Examples From the Iron Range

Common on the larger NE Minnesota Range communities were truck, shovel and belting outfits.  Goodyear took over an old engine house to stock various sizes of conveyor belts for the mines.  All of these businesses would need a "sales" building and land for equipment and supplies storage.

Even the smaller communities here had blasting powder companies.  These were often just buildings on a siding, looking no different than a produce warehouse or cannery.

Buildings for mining company

Take a look at some of the warehouse kits be Walthers or any of the other advertisers, like Monster Model & Laserworks. They have a nice warehouse kit, very nice too.

Remember to add a gantry crane to unload some of those extra heavy loads.

Bernd

Vulcan

Walthers Vulcan Manufacturing would be a good kit.

Look on Bing or Google Maps at First and Furnace Streets in Birdsboro, PA, The Brooke Iron Works made mining machinery back in the day.  The building next to Furnace Street by the Water tower is the PRR psgr station.  The PRR freight station is the one sitting at a diagonal  across the street.  The railroad is the former W&N branch of the Reading.

If you look carefully at the wye leg just above the last hopper in the cut of cars in the Bing view, you can see the round foundations of the coaling towers. 

Across the river is the former iron furnaces that were the last home of the camelback 0-4-0 that currently resides at Strasburg.

Reading 1187 Camelback 0-4-0

Out of curiosity, I had to look at it. As of June last year, it was in Strasburg. Not as pretty as she was in the late '90s. Here she is in the RRPicturearchives.net library:

http://www.rrpicturearchives.net/showPicture.aspx?id=3048919

Having seen the term Camelback a few times, I just had to see one.