Old Dominion Furniture

 On AIR 1 I had a large furniture manufacturer named Old Dominion Furniture. More plausibly it should have been named something more West Virginia-centric, Mountaineer Furniture, Blue Ridge Furniture, New River Furniture, etc, etc, but alas “Old Dominion” was it.

It was a fairly simple model railroad industry that I made a little more complicated. As Elwood P. Dowd* would put it, time wore on. There were five doors for furniture loading and one receiving  door for lumber plus an adjacent storage track. MTY cars from a pool of cars I created for the service were returned to Old Dominion and spotted on the storage track. When loading doors were vacated the switch job moved an MTY from the storage track to the loading door.

After an ops weekend trip to Colorado for Rocky Ops North, and a visit to the model railroad club in the Greeley, CO. Depot, where they had a pile of MDC H.O. Scale Outside braced 50’ double door wood boxcars for sale. I bought twenty, ten with end doors and ten with-out.

The ten cars with-out end doors I painted and lettered for Atlantic Inland (AIR) Furniture Loading, and added those cars to the Old Dominion Furniture freight car pool. The ten cars with end doors I painted and lettered for AIR Automobile Loading and they lived their life between the Auto Ramp and traveling in train #98.

After a few years and gaining a little more knowledge about LCL I added a trap car that ping-ponged between the freight house and Old Dominion.   

I also took a large Walthers kit and kitbashed it, basically cutting it in half then putting the half’s back together end to end, making the building 3” deep and 36” long.

Old Dominion was when I thought I’d embraced the concept of freight car pools. I didn’t realize coal hoppers are a pool too! In any case I began modifying car cards and waybills to restrict certain types of cars to particular types of service: furniture loading, newsprint loading, scrap metal.

I should have named this industry better.I should have looked at my layouts geography and chosen a more plausible name. To be honest no one in Southern California ever noticed. Now that I’m living in the “Old Dominion” we’ll have to see.

Do you have a furniture business on your layout? Have you done anything to add play value to an otherwise loads in MTYS out industry? 


—————-

*Elwood and his 6’-3 1/2” Puka and drinking companion from “Harvey”

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