25 years into modeling, I’ve moved to my fourth home. The HO layout finally has a room of its own (13x28) plus expansion wings through some walls. I’m redesigning it to make it much more amenable for an operations group. I’ve never paid much attention to choosing industries that will need to send materials to each other. For example, a friend has a charcoal briquette factory on his that receives materials from 3 other locations on his layout.
So I’m looking for books/articles and options you’ve used on your own layouts that might provide a kind of flow chart for suppliers. Coal + wood chips + solvents → charcoal briquettes → supermarket warehouse. Or, steel rods → Waltham Screw Co → Ace Hardware warehouse. Or, wood chips → what industries use them?
While you may wish to model a couple of “paired” industries, I prefer to pair most of my on-layout industries with ones not modelled. The on-layout industries ship to and/or receive from industries via staging. This way, you can model the more interesting ones, or those more aptly-sized for a layout and let the boring or overly large ones be somewhere “beyond the layout room”. This has the added benefit of bringing cars from railroads not modelled or not even in your modelled region.
I model southern Ontario in the late '30s, but am also able to run a lot of overhead traffic moving from “somewhere” to “somewhere else”. The only real estate used is the tracks, which are already there.
Most of our layouts are too small to represent the distances which are practical for movement of goods by rail - that’s not to say that we can’t (and don’t) do it, but I’ve found that expanding beyond the layout can be a boon to operations.
I have a tannery which gets hides from the slaughterhouse on the other side of the layout. But, the slaughterhouse needs stock cars, and ships refrigerator cars full of meat, also, and the tannery needs oil, acid and salt, and loads leather goods into boxcars.
In the steam and early transition eras, those reefers needed ice, so I have an icing platform to service them and any passing freights that might need to be re-iced in transit through town. The icing platform also services reefers for the brewery. Express reefers, too, will stop there before and after their time at the Railway Express building.
I’d say my most versatile “industry,” though, is the car float. Pretty much anything can go in and out, so it’s a good stand-in for any unmodeled industry.
For the most part, the rail business is about longer hauls than we can plausibly represent on our layouts. I have dozens of industries, none of which send or receive traffic from each other. They fit into the national rail network in other ways (note that my layout is set in northwest Utah in the late 70s-early 80s and features a number of industries based on that). For example:
Steel fabrication plant. Receives steel plate and coils from USS Geneva Works (offline east staging). Even with Geneva gone now, the area still has numerous such industries receiving steel from elsewhere.
Lime plant. Sends limestone to Geneva and other offline customers via staging.
Commercial bakery. Receives carloads of sugar from California (west staging) and flour (east or west staging).
Appliance distributor. Receives finished appliances produced in New Jersey, Ohio and elsewhere (east staging).
Team track. Once of these gets loads of lumber in Columbia and Cowlitz and Weyerhaeuser boxcars to represent a large lumberyard in my hometown that got the same types of cars from Washington state (west staging).
Packaging plant. Receives paper and cardboard from the Pacific Northwest and southeast. Aslo gets plastic pellets and adhesives by truck (could easily be rail).
Fuel distributor. Receives propane and diesel fuel from refineries in UT, WY, or CO (east staging).
Grocery distributor. Receives 62-foot boxcar loads of beer from Coors brewery in CO (east staging). Receives canned goods from offline canning plants. Receives reefer loads of fresh produce from CA (west staging).
You could have any of these pairings represented entirely within the same layout, although doing that to excess could strain plausibility to operators.
I have to go with Wayne on this one. Most of the traffic out of my inbound trains gets switched out and delivered to several interchanges that also serve as staging. I have several industries but none of them ship to the other. Sometimes a car made empty at one industry will serve for loading at another but that is only a once in a while occurance. Some of the traffic received from the interchange connections does go to the industries but most goes into the outbound trains. Most cars end up moving in reverse of the inbound movement.
Forgot to mention I am modeling New England in the mid 1950’s. Boston & Maine, Maine Central, Bangor and Aroostook, etc. My B&O will serve as a not quite true to prototype for bringing materials in and out of Boston. The Boston and Albany was the closest intersection with the B&O out in NY.
Thanks for the many suggestions already given. One key take home point is to use staging as a way to provide inbound materials/products as well as outbound materials and finished products. Frees me up to indeed model smaller industries.
One of the questions you raised was what industries use wood chips. Wood chips go into making oriented strand board used in the building construction business. Wood chips also are shipped to some paper mills. As someone previously mentioned they are also hauled to power plants burning wood wastes.
I think one thing to always keep in mind if you are trying to model prototypical operations is that freight costs determine the mode of transportation and the distance something is hauled.
By the mid 20th century short hauls were all rubber wheels, with few exceptions. So your New England town might get California produce in a PFE or MDT reefer, but the Vermont apples and Maine potatoes would come by truck (even as solid trains of potatoes were roaring through town in MEC cars.)
I’ve chosen to model a short length of a railroad that blanketed a country. Only about 10 percent of total carloads originate or terminate on the layout. Only about 1% of those cars carry freight between two modeled points - and that will shrivel up and blow away as soon as the prefectural government paves some of the goat trail and two ruts in the mud roads. Given a dozen through trains changing engines at Tomikawa, only one in three will drop a six-car cut and pick up another six car cut. Hundreds of cars pass through town, but only about 25% actually stop long enough to need a quick-look inspection. Most of those go from a local to a through train or vice-versa, without spending a second at a loading platform anywhere on the layout. I’ve modeled a couple of insignificant towns in the heart of nowhere, in one of the least populated parts of Japan. The traffic reflects that.
Forgot to mention I am modeling New England in the mid 1950’s. Boston & Maine, Maine Central, Bangor and Aroostook, etc. My B&O will serve as a not quite true to prototype for bringing materials in and out of Boston. The Boston and Albany was the closest intersection with the B&O out in NY.
Thanks for the many suggestions already given. One key take home point is to use staging as a way to provide inbound materials/products as well as outbound materials and finished products. Frees me up to indeed model smaller industries.
I’ll throw in one concept, that at least int the 60s/early 70s did work with the short haul concept. RRs like the Lancaster & Chester were an integrated part of an overall manufacturing business (Springs Mills), as part of the assembly line. Besides bringing in raw materials from off line, they also moved those materials such as cotton bales to and from warehousing to the mill, cloth to the warehouse, and then to a finishing plant, etc. There were multiple mills, warehouses, finishing plants, spread over two counties all connected by a railroad “conveyer” system.
Moves between different mills (W&LE’s slab trains) and ore moves from the lakehead (B&LE ore from Lake Erie to Pittsburgh) practically the only viable ones that you can do on a layout that isnt some 30x90 monster.
A creative one could be two parallel shelf layouts with a single bridge connecting them across the aisle. One side is the blast furnaces and the associated facilities, the other is the rolling mill. Basically, the J&L mill in Pittsburgh.
It might not help you, but passengers could be hauled to and from many points on line. Passengers are a commodity that could go from any point to any point on a railroad.
I do have a paired industry with cattle pens loading stock cars which are delivered to the unloading pens of a packing plant. Similar to MrBeasley there is an ice house and icing plant for the spur that loads reffers with the finihed product. I dont have a tannery though.
Don’t forget the ever-versatile “freight house” and “team track” options. The Drosophila and Melanogaster Wholesale Fruit warehouse isn’t directly rail-served, but it’s a short haul by truck over to the team track. Likewise, there’s a refrigerated truck that serves the A&P Supermarket.
I will be starting work on the Railway Express depot in the spring. Again, it’s a general-purpose “industry,” which is rail-served itself, and also provides an set of loading docks for various trucks around the layout.
Classic Metal Works has done us a big favor by providing a lot of nice trucks painted up with names and logos of companies we remember. I paired up the A&P market with an A&P truck a few years back, and recently I’ve added a Green Giant truck for my fruits and vegetables, a Railway Express van and a Wonder Bread truck. Like skinning cats, there’s more than one way to link industries on your layout.
and we can’t forget those industries that have both loads out, as well as loads in. My Mud Hen Brewery, for instance, ships in materials for making beer and ale, such as covered hoppers of barley, boxcars of hops and yeast, as well as reefers and insulated boxcars of finished product. This facility also ships out covered hoppers of spent brewers grains, which are used as livestock feed - - all that in one industry! I have several industries like that and they just add more interest to my small switching layout