Rail to Barge transfer: Grain? Part 1

 I guess I never saw a good idea I couldn’t try to make better with dubious results.

 We’ll see. 

I wanted to model coal loading from hoppers to a River barge. My motivation for this was to make use of a fleet of foreign road hoppers I already owned (And purchased without thinking it through. I guess I’m the only modeler in the world who did that).

So these fleets of foreign road hoppers, 87 Western Maryland and 54 Clinchfield*,  would bridge my layout and eventually end up at the River, where they would supply a loader.

Fine, great. Plausible.

Then I got into a discussion, with another modeler who shares similarly poor judgement,  about loading grain at my elevator. He postulated that in many cases grain loading was dictated by harvest rush periods, and that it might not be totally prototypical for my mill and elevator to be loading a relatively few car loads of one type of grain. Now, I pointed out, my elevator is not a collection elevator and not a terminal elevator, but rather a “buffer” elevator that regulates the flow of various types of grains, but that I conceded the “harvest rush” is very prototypical.

How can I model a “Rush” situation on my layout with out trashing the procedures already established?

Load grain onto barges!

Oh Brother…

It’s from small acorns like this that very large pains in the ass are grown. Stay tuned.



*How do I know the numbers are 87 and 54? I just complete an extensive inventory of all my rolling stock.

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