Wingedfoot Paper Part 2: Pulpwood

 On AIR1 a large, centrally located industry, was Wingedfoot Paper. As Jon Cure is fond of saying, a paper mill is the perfect Model Railroad industry. The major raw material is wood pulp. In 1952  pulpwood, cut and stacked like cord wood, was shipped to mills in a variety of cars. Nearly any car you can name was used, or modified in such a way as to become, a pulpwood hauler.

Generally pulpwood was not valuable enough to travel far. The collection of pulpwood racks I have,  needs a great deal of repainting and re-lettering.  I just don’t think it’s likely to see Atlantic Coast Line cars hauling pulpwood into central WV!

I have been toying with the idea of repainting cars from distant foreign roads and just adding a simplified lettering, using the premise that they are not for interchange. We’ll see.

[4/19/22 this afternoon I went through the box of pulpwood cars. I think with only a few exceptions I’m going to have to repaint these flats and letter them for the AIR. There must be close to fifty (50) Atlas pulpwood flats, with bulkheads. I’m wondering if for variety I mix-in some other car types. On AIR 1 I used C&O gondolas. I think I will use some of the AIR coal gondolas for this traffic too.]

Anyway pulpwood should be fairly local. I have racks and gondolas from C&O and WM, I think those roads are fine, as they are not distantly located, geographically.  I also have a fleet of pulpwood flats, lettered for the AIR, with after market bulkheads. I forget the manufacturer. The parts are “White metal”? Very soft and pliable; too pliable, one car went to the floor and those bulkheads are pretty mashed!

On Gary Siegel’s he modeled a pulp spur off the main track in the “Viper “ area of his layout. It’s absolutely brilliant. It captures the rural nature of some pulpwood operations. A small contractor,  Father & Son operation, would fill a contract for pulpwood with the mill, making extra money for themselves, arrange with the railroad for a car or two, and in this remote little spur fill a car or two. In Gary’s era it was chainsaws, in my era, 1952, I don’t know. I cannot imagine filling a pulpwood flat with wood by hand axe.

This also brings to mind chips, wood chips. So common today, in 1952 wood chips were not as common a commodity as pulpwood. I have one chip hopper, a gift from Walt Appel, lettered for his Piedmont & Allegheny RR. I would like to expand this type of traffic a little, but wood chip traffic in 1952 was only a small percentage of the total.

In any case on AIR1 a great deal of pulpwood made its way to the Mill in blocks of one or two cars, picked up from team tracks and rural spurs all over the layout. This was an ongoing process, every session. The only big blocks of pulpwood traveling over the layout were from the WM or out of the east from an  un-modeled C&O interchange. On Mike Burgett’s layout the pulpwood yard is long and narrow and located across the main track from the mill. The mill switcher, I assume within yard limits, scurries back and forth across the main with pulpwood. That is a very nice model as well.

It was a simple loads in, MTYS out proposition. There was a pulpwood yard adjacent to the mill, it’s capacity would ebb & flow with each session. MTYS were billed back to the myriad of different small pulpwood shippers, or just back to WM and the C&O.

On AIR2 I want to plan better, the design of these small, backwoods pulpwood Spurs, to copy more effectively Gary Siegel’s designs. The interchange of blocks of pulpwood racks would continue via transfer runs from connecting lines as well. 

One last thing, when pulpwood and chips travel in a train with coal loads, the wood must be ahead of the coal to avoid contaminating the wood with coal dust. When mine runs return from branch’s with their coal loads it’s important to remember this. So wood on the head end!

Do you model pulpwood traffic? Is your era more suited to wood chips? How do you simulate this traffic?