Industries for the new layout

[Cody J]

I know that I have been posting a lot on here these past few days and I'm sorry for that.

I am building my first model railroad. It is BNSF right after the merger in 1997. The layout will take place in Northwest United States. I am looking to build a good bit of industries for a lot of switching opportunities. But the problem is that living in Ohio, I don't know what kind of industries are in the Northwest. It would be greatly appreciated if you had any ideas for industries.

thanks,
Cody

[simkon]

How about lumber, grain, ore, coal, or livestock. If parts of California count as the northwest, then fruit and inter-modal would be usable as industries, possibly including a loading dock. What part of Ohio are you from, I'm from outside of Youngstown in the heart of the Rust and Secondary Snow Belt  lol

[Cody J]

lol. I'm from St. Clairsville, Ohio. It's about 5 miles west of the Ohio River.

[jettrainfan]

What i do is look on sites like http://www.railpictures.net/ . lets see..... Grain, from elevators http://www.railpictures.net/viewphoto.php?id=148409&nseq=62 and food services. they also ship Tankers to refinerys.http://www.railpictures.net/viewphoto.php?id=140216&nseq=65 My personal opinion is make a few local businesses like warehouses and have a boxcar or something for them and switch empties with loaded. or the other way around.

[Jim Banner]

trainsrock,
No need to be sorry about posting a lot.  I cannot imagine anyone ever complaining about that.  And most of us realize that summer is the time when students have the most time to work on their layouts.

As I see it, there are three kinds on industries on the layout.
- Suppliers who send their products off the layout.
- Customers who buy their supplies from off the layout.
- Supplier/Customer pairs that are both on the layout.

A gravel quarry might sell hopper loads of their gravel in other towns.  He is a supplier who sends his product off the layout.  We don't have to model the other towns but an interchange track would be a nice place to set out cars with a switcher for pickup by a main line train.

A steel supplier probably buys flats of gondola loads of finished steel from another town to sell in your modeled town.  He is a customer who buys from from off the layout.

A furniture builder might import flats of lumber from other towns and ship out box car loads of furniture.  He both buys and sells off the layout.

More complicated scenarios  are also possible.  A stockyard/feed lot might buy cattle from off the layout and later ship them to a meat packing plant on the layout.  The packing plant might then ship some of its product off the layout.

Notice that many of the things are shipped onto or off of the layout.  This can be represented either by setting them out with a switcher onto an interchange track and then picking them up with the main line train for running around the layout a few times.  When the cars come back to the interchange track, they can be from difference places.  For example, a reefer of meat is picked up by the main line train and later comes back as a reefer of produce for the local wholesaler or large retailer.  If you don't have room to run both a switcher and a main line train, you could just set the cars out on an interchange track and pick them up later as if they had been taken out of town, emptied, refilled, and brought back.  If you don't have room for an interchange track, you can always use a siding that doesn't have a whole lot of traffic.  If you have to pull a whole line of cars out of that siding in order to service an industry, well, that happens in the real world too.  Often there is not enough room for each industry to have its own siding, so several industries share a siding.  And this means pulling cars out of the siding to service the industries near the far end of the siding, then spotting them all over again.

Jim

[Frisco]

Well, I live in western Washington, and do a fair amount of railfanning, about 75% of the trains are intermodals, I don't know how much space you have, a intermodal terminal would take up alot of space but would be very cool. We also get lots of grain trains, these come from eastern Washington(technically the Northwest, but with scenery more like the mid west) and take their contents to unloading facilities, usually in Seattle or Tacoma. Although not to the extent it used to be, lumber is still a major industries, you could model it with box cars getting filled at a mill, and taken to a warhouse for distribution. We also have a oil plant, that moves the cargo from train to ship. Coal isn't a Major industry, but there is a coal fired power plant in southern Washington that gets two trains a week, these would have to be run from staging, since the coal comes from Wyoming, and is not mined locally. We also have several paper mills, this could be tied to the lumber industry since the traffic originates from the same place.
Hope this helps,
Ryan

[simkon]

At least what I said lined pretty well with what you said (and you're from the Northwest, so it must be right) Hooray! 

[Chris350]

I would add there is a refrigerated that runs out of Yakima to NYC if I recall from the Discovery channel properly.  I know there is lots of grain, that's all there was for miles when I was in Walla Walla getting my edamuckasion.  I thought most of that went by truck to the Columbia river then down the river by barge though.

[RAM]

You can forget the livestock.  BNSF never had any livestock bussiness.