As I slowly start the construction process of my new model railroad (Almost done with room Prep) I have been thinking about traffic levels on my new model railroad.
The industries to be served on my model railroad are as follows.
In Bound.
Valley Lumber and Building Supply: Finished Lumber and Building Materials.
GE Morgan Valley Tungston Mine Power House: 200-210 tons of coal for power station daily.
Out Bound
GE Morgan Valley Tungston Mine: 140 tons tungston Ore Daily
Farmers CO-OP: Grain as needed
Valley Growers: Grain as needed.
Michielsen Brothers Grain: Grain as needed.
Morgan Valley Stock Yards: Live Stock as needed.
There is also an Interchange with the Milwaukee Road.
My question is while setting up my operating scedules. When would be the best time of year to set my layout, so that I can have healthy levels of traffic coming from all my online industries. Since I have a large numbers Grain elevators on my railroad, that would peg it some time during the Grain Rush. But I am not exactly sure when the “Grain Rush” usually occurs, other than some vauge notion of something like Sept -Nov. The other thing I am not to sure on is when exactly Live Stock shipments were in force. Were they more steady year round because they were supplying far away packing plants with a steady supply of fresh meat to butcher, Or were they highly seasonal shipments and had “rushes” like the grain traffic?
As far as the grain goes, around here we cut wheat in the early summer around May or June, as far the cattle, I do not know much about that. We do grase steers on wheat pasture until the 15 of March then they are about ready for slaughter. Hope this helps. Mike
From the discussions I’ve been having recently with other Midwestern modelers about this very topic, there is no such thing as “the grain rush”, at least not as we modelers envision it.
Conventional wisdom says this: plant the crops in the spring, grow them in the summer, harvest them in the fall, and ship them out in the late fall. Unfortunately, this doesn’t factor in the fact that grain crops are a traded commodity (like Intel stocks), and are more dependant on good prices to move product that the harvest season. Grain can and will sit for up to an entire year before it’s loaded into a boxcar and moved to a buyer’s destination.
Grain elevators are storage facilities, and are filled up during the harvest. The crops then sit there until a broker gets a good price for that product, and THEN the product moves. Today, covered hoppers move a lot during the harvest season, but that’s because they’re nothing more than mobile storage facilities, shuffled from place to place waiting for a buyer (because silo storage is down from what it was 40 years ago). But during the steam era, boxcars full of grain didn’t usually travel around aimlessly waithing for a buyer (other commodities DID however).
You would see a small rush BEFORE the harvest season, with elevators trying desperately to unload their crops from LAST year, to make room for the new crops about to be harvested. This rush generally started in early September.
After the new crops were in, there wasn’t really a rush; more of a steady push
In Iowa & Nebraska there is a rush in late September through November when the field corn and soy beans are harvested. Many of the local community elevators pile grain on the ground waiting for rail cars to take the grain to larger elevators.
I certainly hadn’t thought about the construction industry influence. (My excuse is that I grew up in an area where we had local brick fields and gravel pits).
You might like to take a look at the thread on covered hoppers in the prototype forum. I’ve been going on about boxcars used for grain there. If you are in cattle car era you are far more likely to be shifting grain in box cars than hoppers. Also the Futures and Commodity markets probably didn’t have such a big effect back then. there aslo wasn’t global production.
Covered hoppers are more water proof than box cars could be (don’t know about condensation). Many boxcars (over time) were wood and had issues about holding anything that could be wet for any length of time. they were probably more prone to mildew and other rot/contamination that would damage the grain. I suspect that these were reasons why grain that couldn’t be held back at local elevators would be shifted as fast as possible to big centralised complexes. Grain that has rotted is worthless… better to get what price can be got in a rush than none at all.
Either in those posts or elsewhere I’ve recently posted about use of 40’ / non-interchange cars for the rush. Also about getting the cars into place ahead of the rush and more.
I would have expected there to be a rush of turkeys prior to Thanksgiving. Don’t forget that before stores had freezers and chill rooms fresh meat was a very short life product that had to be got in at the last minute and sold before it went off. (During the Depression of the 30s when my Mum’s dad was out of work he walked from Burnt Oak to Smithfield on Christmas Eve and walked back with 2 HUGE turkeys bought for one shilling (a few cents)… by the end of the week the family and neighbours were sick of turkey… I don’t think my Mum ate it again until the 70s).
You answered alot of my questions that I had and am now confident I can proceed with my modeling as I had originally envisioned it.
As you may or may not know, I am trying to model the GN in 1969. I had originally thought doing it the week before Christmas, but it seems thatk given my current financial status, Im going to have to be content with trying to pull off early september.
Why not start with the week between Christmas and the New Year? That’s almost always pretty slack. Then you have the scenery right to shuffle back a few days to the pre-Christmas rush when you can aford the stock.
{Don’t actually know as fact but I would guess that passenger and Reefer stock from the rush would be shuffled back to it’s normal locations… possibly dead heading in regular traffic with just a few extras. The drained down loco coal (and sand) supplies would also be topped back up to normal (as opposed to pre-rush) levels and the extra ash cleared out}.
1969… Troop Trains for Vietnam??? Or at least Hueys on flat cars. (NMRA did a couple of articles on this somewhere about 2000. Again M113s among other things on military flats?
I’m not sure how much holiday peak traffic by train had lost out to internal airlines by 69.
Part of the problem is I have litterally no budget. So I have to build this layout with items that I already posess. And all my scenery items are geared for a summer layout. So since the grain and the live stock movements are starting to get heavy about them. Early-Mid September seems the next logical choice for me.
There would be a small pre-harvest rush as elevators “clean out” to prepare for this years crop. However, during harvest, there could be a rush, if corn has to be piled on the gorund for very long. If it is piled, a big rush may come before the first freeze, frost, or snow.
From a professional stand point I can tell you that on the NS we run run grain trains year round. although I concider Grain season to be Sept-Dec.
Grain trains is one of my favorite operations on my ho scale Penn Central which is set in late summer/early fall. Point is you dont have to be in grain season to run a grain train.
Thanks for your perspective from the operational side of Railroading. And I am comforted to know that I can run grain year round and still be realistic.
The other thing I am trying to figure out. Were Box Cars still being used for grain loading in 1969 or had things been fully converted over to Covered Hopper by then?
The bulk of the Penn Central hopper fleet came from predicessor roads NYC and PRR. Concidering that the merger took place in 1968 (1 year before the year in question). And the fact that those hopper fleets were already in place at that time should answer your question.
YES In fact some railroads had specially constructed 40’ foot box cars with grain doors installed. (Athern makes grain door box cars.) My 1979 edition of the Official Railway Equipment Register show some of these still in use. During the grain rush shipper will take any type of rail car they can get. Things are more urgent when big piles of grain have to be stored on the ground waithing for shipment.
You can use box cars, but I would suggest developing a fleet of grain hoppers. A lot of the leased grain cars are lettered for the shippers that use them, making for a colorful consist.
Thanks both of you. I had planned on using a lot of covered hoppers on my layout. But since I don’t have eneugh to main tain the roation that I would like I was going to substitute box cars as needed. This information says I can do just that.
In 1969, it’d be safe to say that MOST grain was still hauled by boxcar. Follow the logic:
By 1930, covered hoppers were around, but uncommon, They were short, and only hauled dry mineral products. The VERY few 40 foot covered hoppers were “carbon black hoppers”, carrying essentially toner from foundries to tire factories.
The first “modern” covered hoppers were the PS-2 and Airslide cars, both designed as mineral cars. By 1957 a FEW cars were in use as FLOUR cars, but with only 7100 Airslides nationally, that’s a puny amount. Pullman introduced their first long PS-2 with dedicated grain loading hatches (the PS-2CD) in 1963. The first center-flow type cars (Center Flow and Flexi Flow) weren’t introduced until 1961 and 1964. The first cylindrical covered grain hoppers were introduced in Canada in 1968.
It takes a few years for railroads to afford a large fleet of specialty cars, and longer still for customers to see their benefits and rebuild their facilities to accomodate the cars. By 1940, many companies had invested huge money in 40’ boxcar “shakers”; rotary unloaders of plain old boxcars. It takes a LONG time for a grain company to amortize that sort of capital investment, before they can justify buying something new.
I distinctly remember 40 foot boxcars being used to haul grain throughout the 1970s, and well into the mid-1980s. Using boxcars to haul loose grain outlasted stock car use in the USA, so there had to be places that could handle unloading a 40-footer up to about 1990. The use of boxcars for grain loading saved several wood and composite cars from the scrappers for MANY years; the only time I’ve ever seen them rolling outside of a museum was hauling grain in Wisconsin.
I’d place the tipping point between boxcars and grain hoppers at a