Prep Plant Part 4: A good idea who’s time has not come

 “People wed their ideas with far more devotion than their wives or husbands”. I was devoted to the idea of a coal prep plant. I’m still not ready to abandon it completely, however, it will not be making an appearance on AIR2 as it was designed and discussed all along.

Here are my reasons for dropping this idea. 

Manpower. This idea would require more operators, at least one additional permanent crewman. 

Space. This idea would require a significant amount of space. Now let me explain this a bit further. I HAVE the space on the layout plan. What I don’t have is the floor space. The crew working the prep plant would be occupying the same floor space, for the entire session, as crews working other industries located on DIFFERENT levels of the layout. I’ve made this mistake before, two crews working industries directly above or below each other. NEVER AGAIN.

Additionally I could not figure out how to make the prep plant work for the entire session. Because this is an HO scale model railroad the prep plant doesn’t actually process coal, so once you’ve moved all the cars staged at the start of the session, the plant simply stops. Yes, you could re-stage during the session, but I’m not really interested in doing that.

So it’s a big industry, taking up a lot of floor space, and it only works as long as the man switching it.

One more thing, prep plants are really a creature of the 1960’s onward. The cost of labor being what it has become, it was cheap to hire people to clean coal at tipples, but by the late 50’s this began to become much to costly. Coal companies created a prep plant that processed all the coal coming off a branch. It was far more cost effective to do it that way as the cost of hourly employees rose.

Now I do have plans for multiple coal branches feeding coal trains onto the main part of the layout. The point where the branch meets the main track might be a location for a prep plant. All this version will do is generate a staged coal train

So I’ve decided there will be no major prep plant, at least for the foreseeable future.

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