Some time ago I bought an Oscale concrete silo kit, like the ones most often seen in the grain states like kansas. (i’ll try to get a picture up in case you don’t know what I am talking about). Since then I have decided to model NM. I visited the locations last year and to my suprise… no concrete silos, not one. It seems to me that these silos were used where grain was produced, not consumed.
Now this kit is already built and I would really like to have an excuse to use it on my layout. So my question is, does anybody out there know of other uses for concrete silos that were used in real life? I’m not opposed to modifying the kit to get something more prototypical for NM.
One of the towns that I am modeling is Hatch, NM which happens to be the chilli-pepper capital of the world? Anybody know how chilli peppers where shipped in the late 50’s? Having 50’ silos full of chilli powder seems rather weird but it may be an option.
How about making it a concrete plant. That’s what I did with a Walthers six silo kit. You could make it a storgae facility for a dam site being built neraby.
No silos like that at Hatch. None at Nut either. There are grain storage facilities a little north of there in wheat country. We have picked enough rock there to fill half of one. I would put it in and write a story about a wheat farmer that was going to start a new industry and it never worked when they discovered the peppers grew better.
There are certianly a lot of old buildings around in the cotton industry and the trailer industry to justify such an imagination. There is a lumber yard outside of Tombstone in an old trailer construction building that is a great site, huge building mostly full of junk, roof half blown off and in one corner a great selection of SW hardwoods.
If you are talking about the silos one sees attached to barns on farms, they stored silage, chopped vegetation like corn stakes and grass. The food was used to feed the live stock during the winter.