You bet it is. Otherwise… well you tell the great unwashed, it’s your point, you get the credit.
It really is quite a striking scene in its pure simplicity. Folks can laugh at the 40’ boxcar, the wooden structure with its braces, the seemingly silly practice of moving wheat in boxcars, even the elevators themselves but the whole practice worked and functioned extremely well. With smallish older non fancy no super power steam engines, light rail and branch lines to everywhere. Inefficient! They laugh and howl.
It fed the world.
Found this really old picture of a CPR train in Lumsden, at a grain elevator, but back when it was the Assiniboia Distruct of the North West Territories that later became the Province of Saskatchewan
Van 3522 on tail end of mixed train in flood at Lumsden, Assiniboia, NWT. April 1, 1904.
Note elevator Bready Love & Tryon No. 10.
You’ll notice an arrow on the railway side of the building. A grain elevator siding was always built on a slight grade and the arrow told you which way it sloped (it points down). Empty cars would be spotted to the right or up side in this case, which would allow them to roll left and out of the way as each was loaded. This was once common way to move rail cars about. Sometimes a they’d use a winch system, an old tractor to push the cars, or for big facilities, a locomotive to move them about.
At the peak, in the 1930s, there were over 1700 traditional wooden grain elevators in the province of Alberta, the majority of which were torn down in the 1990s and early 2000s. Today, about 250 remain. Some are still being used as designed, a good number have been saved by local farmers who use them for storage, some are museums, and a few are simply abandoned.
Thank you gmpullman! Just luv these kinds of things. There a still a very few doing this in Saskatchewan but many have been forced away from it by economic circumstances and ‘no choice’ and soon it will all be gone.
Losing all these specialized instruments, machineries and mechanisms is tragic really and along with it a way of life, self fulfilment and human ingenuity.