Industry that you can model

Industry that you can model .

Industry that you can model

For a model railroad, there usually isn't much space to model a real industry without a lot of selective compression.

Here's one that could be modeled full size.

Below is an aerial view of a small commercial area on the west side of Wisconsin Rapids.

30 years ago, the Milwaukee Road, Soo Line, and CNW came through here.
Now there's just the valley sub (ex Milw) and the siding no longer has a switch on the north end.
Some loaded cars are waiting to go to the plant.
Two white tank cars, two black, and two covered hoppers.

The plant is hard to see, it's the fourth building up the street on the left..
There's also a lumberyard, the second business.
But I don't think they get cars by railroad anymore. You could add that for more traffic on a model railroad.

Looks like a white and a black tank car in the view.
I could guess one tank car is out-going product, something for the paper mills in the area.
Even if it isn't, you could model it that way.

This industry gets two different types of cars, tanks and covered hoppers, and that makes for some variety.
If you wanted to back date it, maybe you could substitute boxcars with bagged product for the modern covered hoppers.
They always switch using a 'handle'.
It doesn't seem to matter whether there's a little loco or a big one.
And the handle could some from anywhere, is isn't just stored on the siding nearby.
Sometimes a boxcar, sometimes a coal hopper or two. You could use a variety of cars to model that.
So a little switch job can grow to a long affair.
There must be some restriction in the plant about locomotives.
It sure doesn't seem related to size or clearances, with a boxcar that big.

This is an old picture, I think there's an extra platform now for working one more tank car.
Just one track, holding one or two tank cars, and one large covered hopper.

I have gone back to an old photo program to get smaller file sizes for pictures for a web page.
Some might get blurry if you zoom in a lot. But it saves space for the server and downloads very fast.
If you want the full size picture, please contact me. An e-address is in the box on my index page.

Link back to my index page, Bruce's RailRoad Pictures

my best index page is on the TrainWeb site, as of January 2011.

This page was wrote in May, 2012.