Universal Industry: interchange track. Another industry is a can company.When I worked at one coils of tin arrived on flatcars, boxcars of cans left, solvents came in tank cars, gondolas left with scrap.
If I ever get to the port part of the layout it will have two canneries. One for fish with incoming reefers for fresh and smoked fish and boxcars for cans. Cans for canning would come in a boxcar. The other cannery would deal with vegetables and fruits and again reefers and boxes plus shipping crates delivered and cans delivered, maybe a hopper of sugar or tank of molasses. Wood for crates would come in by flatcar and the same for the smokehouse for the fish, except it would be cordwood for the smokehouse. A distillery would have bottles and boxes delivered, and barrels or kegs. Add that to loads of grain, and hops if a brewery.
That could be interesting. Car comes in one end needing repair and out the other end all fixed - or chopped for scrap.
This is also a nice idea. I like how you included the 'ins and outs'. Boxcab, a cannery would also be great to include.
Yes! I keep forgetting I want a brewery and a winery for the 'Pink Fox Line' of goods. I'm thinking of using a painted backdrop for the vineyards.
That is a great one. The largest generator on my layout has been my flour mill. It has one track that handles wheat loads in and two tracks handling flour loads out. It is always good when you can ship everything by rail. I also have a frac sand plant that runs a lot of cars. Mine receives pit sand by truck, but there are plants that get pit sand via gondola and then clean, dry and sort it to ship by covered hopper. There are also steel mills that receive scrap metal via gondola for recycling, then they ship slabs via flat car and bulkhead flat and coils via coil car.
Another thing you can do is to have a building with a nondescript name such as "XYZ industries" or "John Doe Manufacturing". Since there's nothing to indicate what's happening inside that building you can pretty much set any kind of car you want there.
Interesting as it reminds me that in my original creation of 'Mystrium", (or however I spelled it), I created just such a series of factories and plants to process and use the mineral which came in block, granular and gaseous forms. Thanks for the memory jolt!
In my ho switching layout I model the following industries Brewery including warehouses and grain Food processing and ethanol plant, Scrap metal yard Printing plant Fuel depot This gives lots of different loads and cars to operate
The industries I have chosen for my previous layouts are: 1. meat packing and slaughter house 2. Empire Leather Tannery using hides from #1 3. scratch built grocery warehouse 4. ADM grain elevator 5. scratch built brewery 6. country grain elevator on siding for other rural freight 7. country grain elevator on siding for other rural freight, both shipping to ADM 8. coal mine for power to other industries 9. cold storage and icing facility Thus all typical to central Illinois.
If you're looking for a prototype for a relatively small AAR car repair shop, Google Earth in on Starbrick, PA at Warren Railcar Repair. You can also drop down to Street View right on Route 6 to look at the side of the building and the stuff parked around it. It's pretty compact at around 560' long, two tracks on the inside of the building the full length, lots of cars stored everywhere around outside. Warren (rail) Car is the original erection shop for Warren circus cars, including the Warren flatcars. Over its existence it's seen some of the oddest stuff ever..... 1960's were almost exclusively tank cars, until a 1969 explosion permanently changed the roofline. No more tanks that go boom. 1970's it was a North American Railcar lease fleet shop, lots of banged-up NATX, NADX covered hoppers, and any other private-owner cars (usually not other railroads). Then they became the ONLY eastern railcar repair shop for Railbox, that did not work out well, but the cars that came in looked like they had been put in a dryer, melted, stepped on, and then given to the dog as a chew toy. Then lots and lots of TTX auto racks, DODX flatcars, various salt hoppers from all over the northeast, regular hoppers, wood chip hoppers, etc., etc. Still very much in business today. If you want to develop superior weathering skills, and you like flatcars with wrecked other cars piled on top of them, it's a great facility. Mostly I want to show what a real one looks like, relative size. It is switched with a front-end loader bucket, years ago it was an ancient Fordson tractor. All the track is level to the railtops with dirt, no ties visible at all. What you should know is that this kind of shop specializes in doing cars that usually don't have home shops - private ___X cars, shortlines, leased boxcar fleets during the IPD years. Rarely would you ever see a Class 1 car in a private shop like this. You will see about every kind of private-owned non-tank car though that needs general repairs here. They have also painted a few locomotives, the Allegheny Railroad GP40's and GP35's were painted here. So that's another thing you can model. Probably the absolute oddest thing ever built there is the body for the hybrid Savannah Streetcar that's now running on River St. in Savannah, although that neither arrived or left by rail - it was trucked in. Another one you might get a kick out of is the Western Maryland Scenic Railroad shops at Ridgeley, WV. They do their own work, plus a lot of contract work for Amtrak-compatible private cars, and have even done some contract work for steam locomotive repair. It's a pretty small one-track facility and measures only 175' long.
