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!
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
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.
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
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
Here is the direct link (not via google): http://www.providencenorthern.com/papermill
You are right - it looks very good!
Smile, Stein
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
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!
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.
A roughly 1x10, selectively compressed paper mill scene done by David Popp for the MR layout.
Steve
Steve:
I haven't seen it - what am I missing??
Have you seen pages 68 - 69 of the April 2008 Model Railroader?
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!