I'm the saddest kind of model railroader - New York Central dreams with a Bent, Broke & Bankrupt shortline budget, space and time. Still, I have plans for a railroad serving a pulp and paper community; like many railroaders, I suspect, I'd like to recreate what I recall in my younger years. I got through school working at a large pulp mill (now long gone) in the Pacific Northwest. I'd really enjoy seeing anyone's depiction of modern pulp or paper operations in any scale. Such mills are complex and interesting, and lend themselves to a wide range of rail traffic (chemicals, logs, pulp wood and wood chips coming in, box cars full of finished product going out.)
I've seen the outstanding model of a steel mill posted on this forum; has anyone come close with a pulp or paper mill? I had the opportunity to build the Walthers Superior Paper mill years ago (no longer available new, I gather.) It was a pretty good starting point for a mill, but only that - the real thing is so complex that the Walthers kit, large as it is, would get lost in the sprawl of tanks, pipes, smokestacks, vent ducts, fuel piles, etc. Several years ago I scratchbuilt parts of a mill using PVC pipe sections from Home Depot - cheap and not a bad representation, but this fell victim to space and time limitation.
Does anyone have a good model to show off? I'm sure I wouldn't be the only interested party!
Thanks!
Have you seen pages 68 - 69 of the April 2008 Model Railroader?
Steve
Steve:
I haven't seen it - what am I missing??
A roughly 1x10, selectively compressed paper mill scene done by David Popp for the MR layout.
I'm not sure you'll draw much inspiration from this since you already built the Walthers kit, but I took that same kit, cut the two main buildings in half, and created a long series of structures to fill the backdrop along the wall opposite my large classification yard. I got the idea from the track plan for Allen McClelland's second V&O railroad which I understand has since been abandoned.
I also added a few modular structures from Walthers and DPM components and scratchbuilt a long concrete retaining wall which is intended to hold the wood chip pile. This is a work in progress and what you see was pretty much thrown together just to fill the blank wall. I've moved on to other areas of the layout but intend to get back to this some day. Eventually I want to add photos of other parts of a large paper mill operation behind these low relief structures. It is my belief that for most modelers, this is the best way to model a large industry. Use photo backdrops to represent most of the plant and use 3-D structures only for those structures which interface directly with the railroad. Unless you want to devote most or all of your layout space for this one operation, this seems to me to be the best compromise.
jecorbett:
Thanks for posting, and nice work on the background (and the yard!) I agree that most model railroads can't afford the kind of real estate required for any large industry to be modeled in scale; the approach you used to stretch the buildings by cutting them in half is a good strategy to make the most of what now appear to be princely sums required to buy large building kits. Your use of what appears to be a steel mill heavy industrial backdrop ads a lot of depth to the scene. From eye level, the industrial area probably looks like it goes on for blocks!
I've thought of building a mill on a peninsula with a backdrop in the middle, so both sides of the mill can be modeled, but structures at the heart of the plant can be compressed or implied with backdrop photos. Lights and sounds could really add to the effect, I hope. I've even been toying with a fan-driven dry ice reservoir to generate a steady stream of "steam" that could be piped to stacks and other vents in the mill.
Thanks for showing me your work!
A SPECTACULAR paper mill! This link to the Providence Northern Model Railroad Club shows a paper mill that, I suspect only a club (or a model railroader blessed with lots of money and time) could build - a beautiful piece of work on par with the outstanding steel mill module. If the link doesn't work, cut and paste this address to see a paper mill that couldn't be better (unless it had clouds of steam coming out of it!)
http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://static7.userland.com/ulvs1-c/images/providencenorthern/aquidneck1.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.providencenorthern.com/trainshop&h=1109&w=1280&sz=197&hl=en&start=4&tbnid=VOklsbOYlxdU1M:&tbnh=130&tbnw=150&prev=/images%3Fq%3D%2522providence%2Bnorthern%2522%26gbv%3D2%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DG
Here is the direct link (not via google): http://www.providencenorthern.com/papermill
You are right - it looks very good!
Smile, Stein
Here's my mill. It's not prototypical in its set up, but all the elements are there. Pulpyard is in the foreground, the pulp processing building is on the left, the power plant is in the middle, and the main mill building is center right. The outbound warehouse is on the upper right.
The only thing I wish I had more room for would be a chemical tank farm.
Lee
Route of the Alpha Jets www.wmrywesternlines.net
Steinjr THAT is super inspiring! Wow! I would love some more room to work with but atm, Im stuck with what I have. Something to drool over though for the time being!
alexP
i am in the planning stages of my next layout and it will have a big paper mill.
it uses 3 walthers paper mill kits.
one for the main complex and 2 for a large backdrop building.
I will post some pics of the design when i get it done.
Justin:
That sounds great! Three of those kits (have you had them for a while? I sure can't find any now!) would make a nice mill. One set is just too small. Don't be afraid to use lots of other types of kits, too; the mill I worked at lasted more than 80 years, and was a cobbled-together sprawling complex of cutting edge structures and equipment scattered among ancient brick, cement block, and wood structures; about 30 buildings in all.
TJ
Lee:
Your mill looks really good, and so does your scenery! (I sometimes visit Western Maryland [Frostburg] and your Western Maryland layout scenery work looks very familiar!)
It looks like your mill can keep a switcher pretty busy!
Please post photos as you make progress - I for one am very interested in how your mill turns out!
Here is a pic of my paper mill design so far. At the moment i am trying to figure out how to add parts of the Northern Island refinery to the design. I also am looking at rotary kilns to modify the drum off of the Valley cement into a paper mill kiln. Tell me what you think and if you have any sugestions.
The paper mill sits on two 6 foot by 4 1/2 foot HO corners
Had a problem getting the pic posted so here is a link to it
[img=http://img13.imagevenue.com/loc902/th_38929_Paper_Mill_design_122_902lo.jpg]
That plan looks like a lot of fun! I'm glad to see you have a major smokestack - those are often the feature you see first about a big mill (the one I worked at had a main polution control stack that was 300 feet tall, made of tapered concrete. I once modeled it using a tapered round coffee table leg from a millwork store. It had the perfect shape and proportion, and looked good once I had painted it weathered gray with red and white stripes at the top).
Good luck with your plan, and keep up posted - I'm looking forward to seeing your progress!
What features do you like and not like? From working at a pulp mill for several years, I can tell you that the plan you posted has many good features: a source of logs and wood chips, large piles of chips, a smokestack (modern mills usually have several; some for boiler exhaust and some for pollution control; there are also many steam vents that look like small smoke stacks); you also captured the conveyors, of which there are many. Keep in mind things like many pipes between buildings (that's where parts of the North Island Refinery can come in). Also from the north island refinery might be the upper portion of the "cracking tower," which looks like a chlorine accumulator and several vertical tanks that might be around a mill. You can use an assortment of dowels or plastic tubes (up to 1" PVC pipe) to make the array of pipes connecting different components and tanks. The large diameter tubing can be exhaust ducts carrying air rather than liquid. I especially like your back-in chip dump; that would be a large hydraulic apparatus that could dump rail cars, or could also dump chip semi-trailers. It would be fun to animate!
Oh, Justin:
One thing I forgot to mention that I didn't see on your plan - WATER! Pulp and paper making uses HUGE volumes of water; the bleached and screened wood fiber is suspended in tens of thousands of gallons of water to be processed until it is dried into sheets. In addition, certain processes in many mills use large quantities of steam to help "digest" wood chips into fiber, and also to dry the fiber slurry into solid craft or paper. That steam requires lots of water. So, it is very common to find such mills on bays or rivers. The mill I worked at had a water plant that treated 15 million gallons of river water per day for use in the manufacturing process.
The edge of the body of water could be easily modeled without taking up too much room, and would greatly improve the realism of the mill (and power plant, too) and add variety to the scenery. Just a thought while you're in the planning stages!
That will be a nice asset for your dad's layout - HO buildings for an N scale paper mill actually won't be out of scale, as long as you correct the size of the doors. Paper and pulp mill buildings are BIG - the recovery boiler building at the mill I worked for was 140 feet high - nearly a foot tall in N scale - and the main stack for it was 300 feet tall - almost 23 inches for an N scale mill. Modern mills really do tower over the surrounding landscape.
For the Kiln I plan to use the the one off of the ho Walthers Valley Cement. I think it will fit in nicely based on the pics i found of Kilns i found online. From the same kit i plan to use the smoke stack. It looks like it could be the same stack that walthers used for their Tri-state Power Authority. In the next few years my dad plans to make large power plant based on the Tri-state Power Authority. It will look nice if i can get him to run Power Lines from the power Plant to My Paper Mill. The doors to the building are one thing i am looking at right now.
You could also try the paper mill modelers group on yahoo for more imput,......just my .02 worth.
Tim
The link to the paper mill modelers group is:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PaperMillModelers/
Regarding kilns for limerock, there is an alternative for modelers with space problems. I worked at a mill that reacted the limerock to make process chemicals, but the rock was brought by truck or barge; there was no kiln at the mill site. The rock was hand loaded into two 90-foot vertical concrete silos we called "rock towers." The rock was reacted in the towers to create the acid. (Guess what job a college student home for summer break was likely to get stuck with?? I didn't want to depress myself by ever trying to calculate how many hundreds of tons of rock I loaded by hand!) The "rock towers" have a small footprint and could be easily modeled with PVC pike or dowels, depending on your scale. Using this process, a kiln wouldn't be required at the mill site - though one could be placed elsewhere to generate hopper or gondola loads of limerock for the mill, adding to your railroad's traffic.