I know I haven’t posted in quite awhile. I have been busy with work, which is nice on the MR budget, but little time to actually do some modelling.
I work for a place that manufactures flat bed for pickups. I got to thinking of an industry. My employer gets steel from a place that cuts steel to proper lengths and then ships it to us via truck. We receive steel channel, angle iron, and steel tread plate mostly. When we receive the steel channel and other dimensional pieces, they are roughly cut on the end in 20’ pieces. I was also informed that the steel tread plate arrives at our supplier in large coils and they cut it to size for us.
I was wondering if a steel supplier could be an idea for a rail served industry. I’m thinking bulkhead flats and coil cars inbound with trucks going outbound.
The industries you described are called steel service centers. From my observations, it appears they almost always have rail service. Don’t forget that gondolas could also bring in material.
More broadly speaking, though, if you want to model it, who says you can’t? At millions of points in history, a decision could have been made a different way and changed the whole picture of railroading. Imagine if Henry Ford hadn’t invented the assembly line for automobiles, or the federal government had declined to build the Interstate Highway system or the FAA. What would passenger railroading look like today? And with all those passenger trains ripping around, what would that do to freight traffic? Would Amtrak exist, or would the New Haven Railroad be merrily shuttling passengers along the Shore Line and making fistfuls of money?
Admittedly, most of us who tinker with history do it on a somewhat smaller scale, but you get the idea.
I vaguely recall a kit for a brick structure with a heavy-lift overhead crane that extended out into its front yard, marketed as a steel fabricator. Maybe someone who has more expertise on North American industrial models can expand on this.
Chuck (Modeling Central Japan in September, 1964 - with forest product fabricators)