Was there a typical size or average size if you will for the old wood-crib style grain elevators? Looking for physical size but bushel capacity is also welcome.
Do you have an era or location in mind? Around here they varied from small ones of maybe 60 or 70 feet square in the 1800s up to huge wooden ones that could fill a lake freighter, or two, after the turn of the century. It seems that most of them either burned down, or were torn down to make way for larger concrete structures in the 20s or 30s.
Back when MR actually had `how to build it’ articles, there was one for a typical small-town square wooden elevator. It was sometime in the '50s, IIRC.
I recall seeing such a structure at Burkburnett, TX, in the early 1960s. Its capacity had been supplemented with cylindrical corrugated metal silos, connected to the head house atop the elevator with straight pipes sloped around 60 degrees to the horizontal. The main structure was about 75 feet square.
Chuck (Modeling Central Japan in September, 1964)
I started with a modest sized elevator and gradually expanded it.
Roger
Campbell Scale Models makes a kit of a typical wood grain elevator found in the plains of the United States and Canada.
When I was in Alberta for the NMRA convention in the 70’s there were 5 or more of these structures in each town the CP served.
http://www.campbellscalemodelsonline.com/product_p/0384.htm
Rick
Berk: From the photos I have seen, grain elevators, like coal mines, do not seem to have typical size or design but rather were built to fit the area. You can do the same, so who can criticize!
If you have a particular structure in mind, you can measure its perimeter using Google Earth. You can then find a picture of it on Google Images and using the measurements you obtained from Google Earth, come pretty darn close on the rest of it.
Kanamodels makes a really nice model.
Brent[C):-)]
If you search the HABS-HAER site for “grain elevators” you will get 5 pages of listings for all types of grain elevators including pictures, some of which may contain drawings or other data including capacity.
The HABS-HAER site is one of my first stops when researching buildings.
http://web.mac.com/difdbs/Vanishing_Sentinels/Home.html
http://www.grainelevatorphotos.com/
The first link covers Canada, the second shows pics of Canada and the 48 contiguous States.
This interesting video shows how they were worked:
http://www.nfb.ca/film/grain_elevator
I have built, from lumber decking so it will last many years outside on my garden railroad, a grain elevator similar to the wooden ones found in the northern States and Canada in particular. I am unable to post pics on this site. My web cite, below, should be able to show them.
I
Great film!! , I was surprised to see how he moves the boxcars!! ( at 9:00 minutes in) [tup]
Several other good films on that site as well:
There was a very informative article in the January 2011 issue of RMC on country grain elevators (and a number of articles in other issues covering harvesting, shipping, and selling of grain, and the operation of terminal elevators). In the first two decades of the 20th century, typical elevators in the grain belt of the United States were designed to hold 20-25,000 bushels, while those in Canada’s prairie provinces averaged 30,000 bushels. A table showing elevators on Northern Pacific’s Manitoba Division (in Minnesota only) showed forty elevators, with capacities ranging from 1,000 bushels to 70,000 bushels, so there’s probably a suitably-sized prototype for almost any layout.
I have a couple of Walthers elevators, and recently modified one slightly to include a farm supply store. While there were co-ops in the U.S., they were much more common in Canada.
Wayne
The old wooden grain elevators of the mid-west were typically 24’x24’ square and could be 40-60’ tall. The Canadian elevators for wheat were often 30’x30’ square, and some of them were over 80’ tall. Wheat weighs less than corn. I have seen some grain elevators as small as 16’x16’ square. Not always were they square. Just recently I measured one that was 18’x24’ and little over 30’ to first eaves.