Industrial layout ideas

Jason,

A number of us involved in conducting a show in PA and the steel industry recently began a new group to introduce modelers to more industries to model: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/steelmodelgroup/ Currently, we have two steel and one oil refinery group, which may give you some ideas.

Some ideas for you could include a heavy duty foundry or fabrication shop that has to ship out by rail, and may ship in pig iron, coke and limestone. The foundry would also require wood for making patterns. Another possibilty is to use the cement from Medusa to feed a pre-cast concrete beam company. I have seen a smalll refinery that was very similar to Walther's kit as well.

If you want to represent steel, many facilities only ran coke ovens or a blast furnace. Today's modern mini-mills use scrap and pig iron to feed an electric arc furnace. The steel is rolled on site into raw stock or finished goods.

Yet another idea was featured in a Trains article from 1996 I believe. A short line servicing International Falls MN served an appliance factory like Maytag or Whirlpool. Loads in brought steel coil in gondolas or coil cars and intermodal boxes full of parts and packaging. Finished goods were boxed and loaded into the intermodal boxes for distribution centers.

I am sure I can come up with more if you are interested. As I do not check out this forum much, need to fix that, please send me a line.

Regards,

Stogie

When I worked in the Los Angeles Harbor there was an oil distributor across the street from the terminal where I worked.  There was a fairly large "tank farm" that could be represented with a few oil tanks and most of the tanks on the backdrop.  There was a two track stub spur set that held about 6 tank cars, three on each track, with an oil manifold to the side of the tracks.  If I remember correctly, there was hoses coming up out of the ground between the tracks to allow hook ups for unloading tank cars on the second track, or they might have been long enough to stretch across the inside track to the outer track.  Right nearby was a small building that could easily be represented by a Pike Stuff "Butler building" that was used to store cases of engine oil in gallons, and quarts.  That building may have also been used to store oil in 55 gallon drums.  They would receive a box car or two at the oil unloading terminal once or twice a month, and the product would be unloaded by fork lift and taken to that small warehouse building.  I think there was a small office building in back of the spurs opposite the unloading manifold.  The office building was stucco with a flat roof and about the size of a gas station/mini mart.   The product went out in trucks.  I think they received 3-6 tank cars every week, maybe a couple of times in a week, and two or three boxcars a week.

 Stogie,

Thanks for the information and the link.  Will join up to the group in the next couple of days.  I like the idea of the concrete beam company!  Nice...

Cheers,

Jas...

Russ,

Yes I like the idea of an oil refinery or oil/petrol storage facility.  Have a small one planned for the layout based on two Walthers McGraw Oil kits and using the Walthers Oil Loading platform kit.

Jas...

Hi Jason --

 Edit: after locating Jason's other threads, I realized that this thread was an orphan (posted in mid-march originally, and left to hang until recently resurrected by an answer) - he has already gotten some good advice in his other two threads. Feel free to ignore the advice offered by me in this post.

 I haven't gone out to look for your drawing of your lower level, so I don't know what kind of space you have available for your city/industry scene.

 But I would suggest that you start by thinking about what kind of place you want to model. What part of the US would your city be in? What era is your layout based on?

 Small town? Industrial neighborhood of a big city? Inland or coastal?   Some types of buldings would look at home in a layout placed in the Appalachian mountains in the 1940s, some in a layout based on southern California in the 1990s, some would look good in a smaller inland town in Washington state in the 1970s and so on and so forth.

 And of course - what it says on the outside of the box doesn't need to have anything to do with what that building (or kitbashes partly based on that building) ends up as on your layout :-)

 Smile,
 Stein

The sort of buildings, scenery, plants, geology, is entirely different from one part of the U.S. to another.  In fact it varies widely in So Cal just because houses built in the city and suburbs along the Coast from San Diego to San Francisco probably see snow once every 20 years, and it lasts only an hour or two at most.  A house built in Big Bear, or Idlewyld at an elevation exceeding 6000 feet will be built to withstand monster snow loads.  East of the Rocky mountains where there is a lot of winter snow, shutters are common on most houses.  On the West coast, if you see them at all, they wioll usually be nonfunctional, decorative pieces. 

Edit: after locating Jason's other threads, I realized that this thread was an orphan (posted in mid-march originally, and left to hang until recently resurrected by an answer)

That might explain why the request seemed silly because without knowing the era and location modeled, one is left pretty much clueless to answer.

Hey Stein,

I will take your advice because as you have more than likely noticed I'm in Australia and you guys over there have all the knowledge of areas and industries that could be modelled and which I will be modelling.  As I stated in my original layout plan thread I am looking to model from the 70's through to current (Diesel era onwards).  I have posted givens & druthers in the other thread, and one example that was suggested to me was the Southern & Pacific (SP) because of the vast amount of power & stock available and the interest that I also have to that part of the area.

As I have mentioned previously I am leaning very strongly towards a completely freelanced layout, based somewhat loosely and around RR's that appeal to me.  I'm trying to find an area that would see interchanges between the following RR's  SP, Sante Fe, CSX, Burlington Northern, UP, as these all appeal to me.  So I'm still in the throws of deciding at the moment, any ideas that anybody is willing to pass on will be greatly appreciated and thrown into the mixing bowl to hopefully come up with a workable layout.

I recently received my two must have books "track planning for realistic operations" by John Armstrong & "designing & building multi-deck model railroads" by Tony Koester.  After reading both of these my bottom deck has changed considerably and for the better.  I am now considering making both decks purely industrial/city scenes with several interchanges and based on a purely switching layout.

So please if you have ideas or information pass them on, they will be greatly appreciated, and used in the planning process.

Regards,

Jason...

Jason , Fellows

My experience these past few years of HO industrial railroading has begotten some basic ideas. The formost is having railroad sized industry , A bit of snap track and a smallish building will not generate much carloadings.

Simulated {off scene} portions of a much larger industry are desireable,  giving the {on scene} bits plausibility . Tracks , loading / un loading need be suffiecent to generate carloading and thus traffic . I find that two tracks are better than one in an industry , another switch and the length needed for clearance is the cost .

My Rly is using car cards and waybills controlling four forty foot , or five shorter cars in sets which makes more train , less paper. The begets sidings designed to hold a set , or two sets. most times two tracks side by side.Industies need not take up alot of acerage . My cement plant worked out very well in a wedge shape which did not require turning tracks at ninety degrees to the layout or the length of long thin industry

Interchange yards or tracks are a very helpful traffic generator / absorber . This follows for carfloats {floating interchange ?} These are handy in the taking of any type car and lots of them . This is analagous to the on scene bits of the industry .

I have a blog on the site shewing these uses of space . Tidewater rly .

As far as I know there is no place in the country where all of those railroads mentioned would actually interchange, unless they all meet in Chicago, but an actual interchange is not necessary in your preferred era.  You might need to narrow down your era a bit.  If you model 1970's to early 1990's before the mergers of UP, SP, &CNW, and BNSF, or within a few months after those mergers,you could run locomotives painted for all of those railroads.  Of course, during the time frame immediately following the UP takeover of the SP & CNW, the UP was so fouled up that their trains weren't running, rather they were running out of fuel on all of the sidings on the system. LOL.  Within a few months of the mergers, most of the locomotives were patched, that is they remained in their original railroad colors, but would have a painted patch on the cab with UP or BNSF stenciled on. 

Currently, most of the locomotives in the affected railroads, have been repainted into UP armour yellow or BNSF pumpkin scheme.  There are still a few yellow & blue freight switchers patched for BNSF in local switching service and a few left over red & silver warbonnets that are really looking sad runing on the BNSF.

If you model in the time period before the mergers, late 1980s to early 1990s, mergers took place in 1992 if I remember correctly, you can still run all of those road names without needing interchanges.  All of the major railroads contribute locomotives to a common pool called pool power.  I'm not sure when the practice started, I think probably in the 1980's.  Railroads contributed excess power units to the pool and leased needed power from the pool. 

Here in Southern California we had three class one railroads operating, the SF, SP, and UP.  Shortly following the ICC forced break up of the porposed SPSF merger, the SP was bought by the DRGW and the DRGW name was dropped in favor of the SP, but the UP bought the SP before a significant number of locomotives were repainted from DRGW to SP, so we saw DRGW power mixed with SP power regularly.

Because of pool power, I saw power units from CSX, N&S, Conrail, and BN mixed on to all three railroad's trains.  I think is saw a few MRL units here, but don"t remember for sure.  I also saw a bunch of maroon & silver GE demonstrators on the SP, because they had some mechanical problems with an order of new GE units and GE sent them a bunch of the demonstrator units for "loaners" while SP locomotives were taken back to the factory of repairs.  SF also had a bunch of plain grey locomotives (I don't remeber if they were GE or EMD) because they were power short and received locomotives in primer instead of finish paint to get them online quicker.

After the mergers, particularly the UP merger, a lot of excess power went to leasing companies.  I saw leased power on the UP with a leasor's name on a UP armour yellow and grey units, as well as a rainbow of colors on locomotives from various leasing fleets.

The point is that if you model from the 1980s-2008, you can run almost any then current paint scheme on any  train without needing interchanges.