Hold your Nose!

  Packing plant use just about everything, but do ship some stuff to other companies for processing:

Hides - Shipped to leather/shoe factories after having been in the 'maggot pit' for a few weeks.

Edibles/Non-Edible tankage - The 'remains' are shoveled up and pumped into tank cars.  I 'worked' this job for a couple of weeks one summer(it was better than working the maggot pit!).  Makes one want to go to college real fast!

Jim

Well, Jim.  I didn't think when I posted the query that I'd actually turn up a model railroader who had really done the job. This hobby is great!

I can commiserate on the dirty job issue as well.  One hot west Texas summer, I worked as a hod carrier for a mason whose job was to build a new cinder block outdoor pen for a guy who raised parakeets.  First part of the job was cleaning out about 10 years of bird droppings from the old cage in 100 degree heat.  Went back to school in the fall with renewed committment.

Here is a search page for Darling International facilities. You can get addresses from there and look on http://maps.live.com/ for aerial photographs (Bird's Eye View) of rendering plants, if available for those areas, to see what they look like.

Also, Mike Rowe worked at a rendering plant on a recent episode of Dirty Jobs. 

Rather than hold your nose, I'd hold the bus.

I would say that a packing plant would be rather low probabilty  on the T&P west of Abilene.

Immediately west of Abilene was an air base (with another at Pegasus - Pah-gay-sus).

There was a gypsum board plant at Pyramid, TX.

Colorado City and Stanton had a cotton compress.

Midland had a feed mill.

Several locations had scrap yards.

The whole area, especially Midland/Odessa area was chock full of chemical plants, drilling mud companies, pipe yards and metal/steel yards.

Odessa had a double sided circus ramp, and a General Tire plant.

Arcade had a sulphur plant.

Monahans had a Beer spur, and produce shed.

Wild Horse has a talc plant (West Texas Talc.)

Allamore (Crusher) had a ballast pit.

West of Allamore its pretty much just sand and scorpions.

Dave H.

 Greetings,

There is a rendering plant kind of near me.  If you google earth it find Gastonia, NC.  Find US 321.  Follow it South to near the North Carolina South Carolina Border.  It is served by Norfolk Southern.  God help you if the wind is against you!  Better yet it is right accross the highway from the "poop plant".  There are frequent fish kills downstream near where Crowders Creek enters Lake Wylie.

Safely out of range,

Bob

I've read of this stuff being shipped in both reefers and gondolas.  The account with the reefers was in Trains magazine some years ago.  Evidently, there was a drag of loaded reefers that was set aside for some reason (perhaps a wreck?) on a track out in the country.  For some reason, it was forgotten for quite some time, and when they finally went to get the cars...well, you can imagine.   Supposedly, the cars were burned on the spot, then all the metal parts left were picked up in gondolas, for salvage.  I'm planning on including a tannery on my layout, and will scratchbuild a few 36' boxcars "on their last legs" for "HIDE SERVICE ONLY"

Wayne

mreagant

As my T&P layout moves west toward Sierra Blanca, I've been trying to find a very small industry to place west of Abilene.  It occured to me that, since I had cattle pens, either a small packing plant, or a rendering works might be great. 

Just a stock pen would be more likely.  All the packing and rendering plants were in Ft Worth (many on the Ft Worth Belt Line (in the stock yards area).  When I rode the FWB engine in 1980 (actually was a MP job) there still was a rendering plant there.  By then the cattle operation by rail was gone and the rendering plant only shipped lard and oils.

Thanks for all the suggestions. Plenty of good ideas.  I'm looking for a small 'something' out where the sand and scorpions are west of Midland/Odessa as an excuse for a short siding.  I already have a stock yard in Ft. Worth, so I'd like to not repeat that.  The same section of the layout has an oil-loading platform with  a three track siding.    At the minimum, it can serve the oilfields as a spot to off-load oil field equipment.  We'll see.

By the way, is a "Beer siding' what it sounds like it is, or is it railroad slang I've never heard before?

mreagant

The same section of the layout has an oil-loading platform with  a three track siding.    At the minimum, it can serve the oilfields as a spot to off-load oil field equipment.  We'll see.

You have outbound oil. 

You have inbound pipe (a "pipe yard") where the drill stem is sorted and prepared or oil pipeline pipe is stored and prepared.  It recieves gondolas or flatcars of pipe most eastern rust belt railroads.

There are steel fabricators that make drill rigs, and industrial structures for the oil industry.  Once again flats and gons of steel shapes, heavy on the rust belt railroads.

There are drilling mud distrubutors, drilling mud being fine clay thaat is mixed with water and pumped down into the pipes as they drill as a lubricant and coolant for the drill.

If you don't have a cattle pen Abilene, where do the cattle come from that go to Ft Worth.  They load cattle at Abilene and unload them at the packing plants at Ft Worth (of KC, St Joe, Omaha, Chicago).

mreagant

By the way, is a "Beer siding' what it sounds like it is, or is it railroad slang I've never heard before?

Its a beer distributor (recieve inbound loads of beer, NOT a brewery).  There were several along the line.  The one up on WMW&NW was one of the only reasons to keep that line going.

The air bases would get aviation fuel in silver DODX tank cars, plus in the 50's would be getting inbound supplies and vehicles.

You could put any industry there, your choice, I'm just making some suggestions of industries that might give it a more uniquely W Texas feel.

While I really like the Beer siding idea, west Texas in the '50s was 'dry' in more than the precipitation sense, so I may not go there.  However, the oil field supply idea fits right in.  Works in a lot of ways.

Also, I thought a lot about how Ft. Worth got the cattle, so the pen is an off load from a FWD/T&P interchange from off line facilities.  It also takes truck delivered livestock from surrounding counties.  Space in that section does not allow room to model the packing plant so that will be off layout as well.

Thanks for help focusing this part of the layout.

While I really like the Beer siding idea, west Texas in the '50s was 'dry' in more than the precipitation sense, so I may not go there.  However, the oil field supply idea fits right in.  Works in a lot of ways.

Also, I thought a lot about how Ft. Worth got the cattle, so the pen is an off load from a FWD/T&P interchange from off line facilities.  It also takes truck delivered livestock from surrounding counties.  Space in that section does not allow room to model the packing plant so that will be off layout as well.

Thanks for help focusing this part of the layout.

An air base could be as simple as a spur leading off the edge of the layout with a fence, gate and big signs that say , keep out, government property.  The base switcher would "pull" the cars into the layout and shove the outbounds to the track.  The TP just spots the cars on the lead.  Just an idea.

By the way, those helium tank cars operated over this line, the ones that looked like a stack of pipes.  I believe that the wells in W Texas produced helium.  I have seen the cars in the Ft Worth yard in the 1980's.

Abilene proper did have a small packing plant; Gooch Packing Company; it closed in 1990.  I believe it was located on the old FW&D mainline to Wichita Falls; although I doubt there had been any rail traffic to or from it in decades.

In the early 80's, there was a daily turn from Wichita Falls that occasionally left a car or two of interchange for the T&P/Mopac.

Pride Refining north of town on the FW&D refined jet fuel; some of it was shipped out in silver DOD tank cars; I don't know if any of them went to Dyess AFB; I think some of these cars ended up in Grand Prairie at the Dallas Naval Air Station.

In the late 70's, the Roscoe, Snyder & Pacific was still hauling interchange between Snyder and Roscoe (Santa Fe to Mopac).  There was a tank car cleaning/repair plant in Roscoe (I worked for a company which did track maintenance there); strings of tank cars & covered hoppers were delivered/picked up frequently on the Mopac.  The last time I was through Roscoe; the tank car operation had moved to the site of the old RS&P's shop facility; part of the old RS&P main was being used to store tank cars.

At least some rendering plants got their raw materials in open gondola cars.  In Oak Creek WI (a southern suburb of Milwaukee) there was a Hynite plant, which made fertilizer and animal (chicken?) feed, the Peter Cooper glue works, next to each other on a spur of the C&NW.  I recall open gondolas full of "fleshings" -- hide with stray bits of meat stuck to it, bones with chunks of gristle or flesh, all rotting merrily in the July sun and attended to by a million feasting flies.  Liquids would drip from the bottoms of the gons onto the ties and rails.  These gons might have been from the many nearby meat packing plants, pet food plants, and tanneries, and remember that in a dairy state such as Wisconsin there is a constant supply of, shall we say, retired dairy cows to content with.

The spur in Oak Creek was on a wye that also served a scrap metal outfit, the local sewerage district (they got tank cars of chemicals),  a team track, and a long abandoned spur to an equipment manufacturer, with a barrel cleaning company nearby and the long track which would hold bad order coal gons brought up from the Oak Creek Power Plant to be taken to the Cudahy Car Shops for repair.  There was also a dedicated scale track and Hynite had its own scale track as well.

What with those "gut cars" as the railroaders called them standing for long periods until the plant could accept the load, needless to say real estate prices were rather low in that particular neighborhood although oddly enough there were plenty of houses and apartments right nearby and even taverns that served food.   As it later turned out, everyone objected to the smell of the Hynite plant, glue factory, and sewerage treatment plant, while unnoticed by nearly everybody, it was the barrel cleaning outfit that was really doing serious environmental damage to the area -- powerful solvents would clean out very hazardous chemicals from 55 gallon drums so they could be reused, and they were just dumping everything on the ground, a real low budget outfit that nonetheless had its own railroad spur.  It took years and millions of dollars to even partly clean up that land -- AFTER it had been partly developed for residential!

Way before my time the C&NW depot there had passenger service and I can only imagine what it was like standing on the platform on a warm day with those various industries and open loads nearby. 

Dave Nelson 

dehusman

An air base could be as simple as a spur leading off the edge of the layout with a fence, gate and big signs that say , keep out, government property.  The base switcher would "pull" the cars into the layout and shove the outbounds to the track.  The TP just spots the cars on the lead.  Just an idea.

By the way, those helium tank cars operated over this line, the ones that looked like a stack of pipes.  I believe that the wells in W Texas produced helium.  I have seen the cars in the Ft Worth yard in the 1980's.

I would imagine that Dyess AFB's signs in the 1950s may have also had "use of deadly force authorized" on them.