I was raised near the short line that fed the St Regis Kraft paper mill in Jax Fl. from 62 until 1980. The mill used pulpwood rack cars stacked horozontally with bulkheads. Thy were almost exclusively Southern, ACL, Seaboard, or SCL later on. They also used the large Greenville woodchip hopper cars from the late 60’s until the mill went to recycled exclusively-no more smell. I saw a lot of ACL black and yellow engines, family lines engines, and SCL engines. I recall seeing a few slugs from SCL, and even the use of SCL passenger locos to help pull freight to the mill. I don’t recall seeing any Seaboard locos for some reason. I’ve been in many of the cabooses as well, orange and black, and Family lines. This line also went to the Anheiser Busch plant, and many reefers carried beer and later on auto racks to Blount Island to the port of Jax. This was a very interesting era, and made me a huge train buff for life. I could look out of our back window and see St. Regis mill across the river. Randy
Kinda odd that thread is revived now. Just yesterday I started a thread about my new layout and it features a pulp and paper mill. I know the St Regis mill and several other mills in north Florida and south Georgia. Here is a link to the mill in Stevenson, Alabama that I used as a prototype for several structures: Stevenson Mill Their product is corrugated media (what civilians call cardboard) used to make all those light brown boxes and whatnot. For that particular product, hardwood trees are used. For the type of paper described in previous posts of this thread, softwood trees are used, mostly slash pines and sand pines.
That stuff at the bottom center of the image is the wood supply. Hard to see, but it looks like a mixture of cord wood (4’ logs) and long logs. From there the wood is fed into the barker-chipper (that long silvery thing heading northeast) and the output goes into those two big piles to the left (light yellowish) and right (slightly darker tan). In the center there are a lot of giant bales of recycled boxes, delivered over-the-road in tractor-trailers. Those two long diagonal buildings are the four drinier paper machines, and they are an essential structure for any paper mill.
No reason to go into much more detail here. There is plenty of reference material available for those who are interested. Just thought I’d chime in . . .
Robert
BTW csxbuschyard, do you recognize the name of the intermodal yard on my layout?
How can I see your layout? I bought all of the “Trees and Trains” cornerstone kits, and I have many of the 40 ft. pulpwood cars-mostly ACL. I am considering the Superior mill kit, but highly modifying it. I have not found hardly anyone building a truly southern railroad scene-(flat
At the bottom of my posts there is a LINK to my layout blog. Click on the blue text and it should open up a new window. There are track plans for the upper and lower levels as well as photos and sketches and whatnot plus a fairly detailed description and design narrative.
Not an exclusively southern layout, though. Bits of Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Wyoming all cabobbled into a cohesive whole. Hopefully. That’s the great thing about this hobby, you can turn a corner and time-warp across time and space, and if you pay attention to the transitions the whole thing can work.
Robert
Thanks Robert, I checked out the link. Looks like a great layout! Plenty of space- especially for N gauge. I did notice the Talleyrand Docks as Jaxport has. Blount Island here is really expanding, as well. I want to depict a North Fla/South Ga. type of scene, as I haven’t found anyone doing this. Logging operations from Cornerstone trains and trees kits, sent to the paper mill, and Jacksonville’s Strauss Bascule Trunnion bridge over the St. Johns river to the Union terminal (passenger station) just past the FEC bridge. I want to incorporate ACL, FEC, Southern, Seaboard, and somehow Norfolk and Western late steam era. I have much of this equipment already, HO scale as well as a Bachmann Spectrum Dynamis DCC control unit. I have a 12x15 bedroom space to accomplish all of this. Randy
Atlas makes some stuff painted and lettered for Atlantic Coast Line in N-scale (probably more and a better selection in HO). I have a string of 20 pulpwood bulkhead cars that I run as a unit train pulled by a couple of SD35s, solid black with some gold pinstripe highlights (ACL in the early seventies).
I don’t model actual forest and/or logging operations; my action starts after the log train is dispatched from the staging area heading for the debarker/chipper located at the lower left of my layout. It will look something like this (more or less, probably less):
There are some industrial kits available that can be kitbashed (severely kitbashed) and/or cannibalized for parts, but quite a bit will need to be scratchbuilt. I have a desktop milling machine and can design and fabricate whatever is needed (as time and budget permits).
Robert