Will the operators notice?

 All I really want to ask is, “Will the operators notice?”

I model a grain elevator and mill, PE Frantz Co.

This elevator is not a Collection Elevator and not a Terminal Elevator, it is a buffer elevator, or a “Sub-Terminal Elevator”. Grain of various types come in during harvest or rush seasons and it is stored until months later when it is shipped to end users, there-by evening the flow of grain from farmer to consumer. Whew!

Like the elevator located in the north end of the town I actually live in, Winchester, VA, there is a “Consumer” directly adjacent to the Elevator. In the case of Winchester it’s “Miller Milling”, On my layout it’s PE Frantz Milling. Directly adjacent, in both cases, real life and my layout, is New World Pasta.

So wheat comes in, some of it gets milled into flour, and that flour is made into Pasta.

Boxcars of grain come to my elevator. Each waybill is marked with a different grain type. So when the local arrives he finds out what the elevator is loading today, Wheat for example,  and then he gathers all the cars billed with “Wheat” and spots them on the loading tracks.

Okay so far?

While staging the layout I take a look at my car fleet, those cars in staging that need to be re-billed for the next session, find a Northern Pacific 40’ Boxcar and imagine I’m back in my college days in the “wilds” of Eastern Oregon, where I was surrounded by wheat fields as far as the eye could see. 

I bill that car with a waybill that reads “Wheat”.

Next I find a wood, outside braced boxcar lettered for the Ft. Dodge, Des Moines & Southern. Ah, the Ft. Dodge line…

Corn.

I find a double sheath wood boxcar lettered for the Southern Pacific and think back to an article I read in the mid 1970’s stating that next to the Far East, California is the largest producer of Rice.

See where I’m going?

So,  I ask, after all this collective knowledge. After all this work. After all this…

Will the operator notice?


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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....
Read more

Freight House Operations: LCL and Freight Houses

 LCL is a huge source of revenue, car loading, and tonnage for railroads of the steam era. By the end of WWII numbers dropped fast, mainly due to trucks and roads. But to be honest LCL continued to be a big part of railroading. Today all that UPS traffic is LCL. There has been a lot of discussion of late about how to implement LCL  on a model railroad. My feeling is I do not want to perform a function by simply standing and counting off the seconds, pretending to off load LCL packages. What I did on AIR1 was to print up Waybills that simulated packages of LCL.  The peddler car was placed in the consist of a local, the car card for the peddler car had multiple bills in it, and as the local got to each depot, the train crew would check their LCL bills to check for a set out. You did not set out the car, you set out the BILL.  I extended this procedure for REA packages, US Mail, passengers, and now I plan to add this function for loaded milk cans, but more on all that l...
Read more

Freight House Operations: LCL from Foreign Road Freight Houses

 On AIR 1 while WM , N&W, CRR, and VGN trains had trackage rights over some or all of the layout, there were no freight houses for these foreign roads. Often in towns served by two or more competing lines one will find a freight house for each of these roads. In Winchester, VA the freight houses for the PRR and the B&O still stand today. On AIR 2 I do not plan model the extensive trackage rights as on the first layout. I plan to have these foreign roads to come on to the layout via either a short run of their track, visibly modeled, terminating at an interchange point, or simply a transfer from an off layout staging yard. In short fairly limited presence. However at each of these interchange points there should be some foreign road structures in their colors to give strong visual clues that these tracks do indeed belong to someone else. In a few cases, WM and N&W  for sure, some of these foreign road structures will be a freight house. Again, relying on the Kalmbac...
Read more