Let’s say you have a large industry on your railroad. How do you organize the different buildings or needs of the industry?
Suspect that your question is a little too generic. Do you have a specific type of industry, a specific era and a specific amount of available place in mind ?
Edit: Kalmbach has these “Industries you can model” type of books, that describe “typical” (for modelling purposes) track configurations for a few different types of industries - like mines, flour mills, meat processing plants and quite a few others.
Smile,
Stein
Working off of theory here since I’m still in the design stages. Your question implys to resemble prototypical operations so I’ll veiw it as a real life scenario which leaves 2 basic options.
option #1 assumes the business purchased an existing building complex already with rail access. This means they organize their needs around existing structures to allow effective work flow and build or add on as needed, with all focus on access to the rails since relocating the rails are not an option.
option#2 assumes the company purchases undeveloped land with rail access and builds accordingly within the space allowed. This scenario most likely means larger but fewer structures of similar materials.
Both options require the company to develop hands-on flow charts (basically a map of where the material flows from one step to another) to determine the ideal floor plan. This also must mean they know if they are rail-in/rail-out, rail-in/truck out,or truck-in/rail-out. this also requires knowing the volume in and the volume out. Using a trash incinerator as an example there will be scores of incoming cars of trash but only a handfull of outgoing cars of ash for the landfill
Veiw the way to your answer as a flow chart. We will use a common activity to do this…grocerys. You carry the grocery bags in the house (rail-in) and set them on the counter/table/floor (temp staging), open the fridge/cabinets and put the grocerys in the appropiate spots (storage/long term staging), when it comes time to cook you may have some prep work (pre-process) most of which is done on the kitchen counter/stove/oven (in-process), the next step is post process delivery (food to the table,[rail-out]) for you to eat (you, the consumer).
You can apply the same thought process to your rail yard after you determine your most common cargo and their destinations.
Hope this helps…sometimes I tend to read into things a bit to much.
Sorry for not being specific, enough. I am attempting to gather ideas to understand the situation with industries that have many buildings.
My Metal Works is going to be a complex of 6 buildings or so and associated infrastructure. I have read all of the Kalmbach materials about operations and industries over the last 6 years or so and most address industries with one or two buildings.
The best and closest example to my situation is that of the auto factory that offered a early traffic form and a later era traffic with the difference between the buildings etc.
I am hoping those who have had experience with large industrial complexes on thier railroads will offer thier input.
Walther’s has a book on the steel industry, and supporting industries, and how to model them. It’s in the garage, I can get the title in a minute.
I searched the forums for “metal works”, “steel mills” and a few others. Potensially interesting thread:
http://www.trains.com/TRC/CS/forums/977330/ShowPost.aspx
In this thread, someone refered to Dean Freytag’s “South Ridge Lines”, which has a sizeable steel mill complex.
Online article at: http://www.trains.com/mrr/default.aspx?c=a&id=211
Seems like Freytag (And Bernard Kempinski) has written quite a few articles on larger industrial complexes:
http://index.mrmag.com/tm.exe?opt=S&cmdtext="FREYTAG%2C+DEAN"&MAG=ANY&output=3&sort=2
http://index.mrmag.com/tm.exe?opt=S&sort=2&output=3&cmdtext="KEMPINSKI%2C+BERNARD"
Probably some stuff worth reading in amongst this stuff.
Edit: Another search at index.mrmag.com - all articles with keyword “INDUSTRY”:
http://index.mrmag.com/tm.exe?opt=S&cmdtext=INDUSTRY&MAG=ANY&output=3&sort=2
Grin,
Stein
Research that type of industry.
Option#3 assumes company did either #1 or #2 and then expanded capacity or variety of products and had to add on to the buildings. That can result in a virtual hodge podge of buildings.
The flow chart idea is good but since you won’t have the room to replicate it and are probably only interested in the rail served portions, try to determine what they recieved or shipped and what buildings they used for those activities. Then arrange the sidings to support those activities, using the general flow to arrange the buildings. But even that is flexible. If a company recieves metal to make widgets, recieves wood to make crates and ships crated widgets the spots could be ordered metal-wood-outbound (all inbound on one side) or metal-outbound-wood (widget production on one side, crate production on the other).
Consider how the material will be moved inside the plant. For example if the plant recieves a bulk commodity (coal for heating) it will want it pretty close to where it will use it becuase its harder to move as opposed to a liquid commodity (oil for heating) that can easily be piped anywhere they want it.
The best way is to find some plants that make what you want and then use one of the aerial photograph mapping searches to look at it. Or search for images in Yahoo or Google. An hour or two playing on the computer can turn up a wealth of information.
Dave H.
The problem is, there is no generic answer to this question. You can’t ask “how are multi-building industries laid out” because the answer is, they are all different, depending on the type of industry, what kind of processes go on there, and so on…
First, you have to define what a “metal works” is. For example, is this a steel plant? If so, there are many real-life examples you can check to see how the buildings are placed.
Over the years Walthers has published good books on select industries typically to go along with their introduction of model kits for that industry. The automobile and steel industry books are particularly worth while. These are starting to get premium prices at swap meets and I note that the NMRA has sold out of its reprint of the Dean Freytag steel book.
Freytag’s Cyclopedia is still available however and that might give you good ideas for a sequence of buildings. It is highly recommended!
Thinking about industries that work with, rather than make, steel – in my own case a large manufacturer of shovels and draglines, Bucyrus Erie, the plant was built over time so you have 1890 vintage brick buildings next to concrete steel and brick curtain wall buildings from the 1940s next to prefab steel buildings from the 1970s, arranged in varying directions as the company acquired more real estate to fill several city blocks. For modeling purposes, not all of these buildings have rail service so whether you model the entire building or just a front or low profile might be a function of just how much it means to the actual operation of the model railroad.
Maybe a bit of info on how this large plant works from a railroad perspective. Huge sheets of steel are delivered by the UP (formerly C&NW) on flats and in gons on the siding that parallels the main. This material is taken by industry switcher into the plant where it more or less disappears from view until it comes out as large fabricated components, where it is t
If you have a specific type of industry, or a specific industrial facility, in mind, pin down the geographical location of the prototype(s), go to Google Maps or Mapquest, bring up the aerial views and check out building location(s) and rail siding layouts. I used this method to learn far more than I could from the street about my neighborhood industrial district (much of which is behind opaque fences.)
Chuck (modeling Central Japan in September, 1964)
Some rules of thumb:
-
Keep materials flowing in one direction
-
Locate incoming materials by rail and outgoing products as close to the rail line as possible
-
Dependent on size and frequency of railcars incoming and outgoing provide a recieving and separate shipping track or tracks.
-
Work with the topography for your building locations
One good source for researching prototype industries, especially industries before mid-2oths century, is Library of Congress online. Go to www.loc.gov
then click on American Memory, opens big set of categories
then select Architecture/Landscape, opens a long list of collections
then select Architecture & Engineering/ Historic American Buildings Survey/ Historic American Engineering Record. then in THAT collection, enter a search term.
Many of the records you pull up with have numerous black-and-white photos of a site from many angles specifically to show the structure and arrangement, scale drawings, and written explanations. Many of the records were done during the Depression as a way to provide government-financed employement for out-of-work architects, draftspersons and engineers, as well as to provide a record for posterity. AND FOR US MODELERS!
Thanks everyone for the wonderful input!
I stayed up late last night organizing my industry by function in the different buildings and then divided them with three planned cross streets that the intra plant trucks will need to travel to haul between the buildings.
I anticipate the arrival of that Freytag book. It might help nudge me with ideas. I dont know all the answers and will never know everything but a few WAG’s (Thanks Poteet!) with some measure of modeler’s license should do the trick.
While you wait for Freytag’s book from Walthers - here is a link to the layout plan from the Nov 2003 MR: http://www.trains.com/mrr/objects/pdf/ra1103_a.pdf (as always - track plan database only works if you are a current subscriber to Model Railroader).
Freytag has a pretty hefty industrial area centered around steel industry there.
Grin,
Stein