How do Rail Operations work for the US Sugar Corp's South Florida lines. From what I understand the cane is loaded at a facility in Bryant,FL and then is shipped out to facilities in Belle Glade and Clewiston. My question is, what do the facilities in CLewiston and Belle Glade do?
Refining and processing sugar:
https://www.sugar.org/images/docs/refining-and-processing-sugar.pdf
I tried to sell my two cents worth, but no one would give me a plug nickel for it.
I don't have a leg to stand on.
One other aspect of the US Sugar's RR operations is the branch that runs up to Sebring, FL. Just south of town they have a small interchange yard with CSX. About every week or two a couple of CSX locos bring in a string of cars and leaves with another. Sometimes they just have cars going one way. The train usually consists of covered hoppers (probably fertilizer sinced they are often Potash Corp cars).
A sugar mill would be a very interesting industry to model. The southern factories and New York produced sugar from cane. The New York mills were on the harbor and received ship loads of imported cane. The upper Midwest (Michigan and Minnesota most notably), high plains (Colorado, Nebraska, Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho) Utah and California mills processed sugar beets. I'm currently designing the wastewater treatment facilities for the last Colorado sugar mill, and spent the past two days visiting the USA's largest sugar refinery in Paul, Idaho. The Mills are interesting pieces of industrial history as most were built in the late 1890s to 1910s and are still in use (Albeit with many upgrades).
For modeling rail operations, the inbound traffic would include beet hoppers (unfortunately trucks took over most beet hauling by the late 1960s to 1970s), hoppers of coal for the boilers, hoppers or gondolas for limestone, tank cars for sulfuric acid and sodium hydroxide, covered hoppers for soda ash, boxcars for packaging materials and small equipment, and flat cars for large tanks, vessels, and other equipment.
Outbound traffic would be boxcars for bagged sugar, covered hoppers for bulk sugar, tank cars for molasses (smaller mills shipped this to larger mills for processing), covered hoppers for pressed pulp (animal feed), and hoppers for spent lime (concrete additive, soil ammendment, and feed lot base).
Virtually every type of rail car except stock and reefers. The one thing you wouldn't want to model is the very "unique" odor of the sugar refinery!
Ray