Got to be large grain elevators. My Santa Fe in Oklahoma 1989, models an area where wheat, grain and elevators are everywhere. On my layout is a town, Enid OK, where I grew up, and I have modeled 11 of the grain elevators of Enid, plus several in other towns. Unit grain trains are king. The other major industry is the old Champlin refinery at Enid. It has been gone several years, but I have it modeled and on the railroad. Then there is the Farmland Ammonia plant and on and on.....
Bob
My favorite industry in a scrapyard. This one place specializes in scrapping old freight cars. Usually cars get spotted and don't come back out... Good riddance to those old cars with the high brake wheels.
Mike WSOR engineer | HO scale since 1988 | Visit our club www.WCGandyDancers.com
Steel mills. They handle the inflow/outflow of materials thru boxcars, gondolas, open-top hoppers, covered hoppers, tank cars, and 'coil' flatcars. And they have interesting intra-plant specialty equipment: hot metal "bottle" cars and slag pots. Add grotesque architecture and heavy machinery into the mix, and you can create quite an interesting layout.
-Ken in Maryland (B&O modeler, former CSX modeler)
Any Industry that loads Rail Cars.
Russell
I love those books, if not for modeling just simply for an interesting read. i have 2, 3, and 4 and do plan on getting 1. For instance, from the first one, Jeff Wilsons idea for an oil distriutor is very close to what looks like stood in the small town (lets say 1000) that my wife grew up in. The concrete 'walls' the tanks sat on and a small steel building still stand.
There are also a number of other 'layout ideas' published in the books that are nice, such as in 4 for a brick plant.
For a fav I would pick grain elevators for the as mentioned reason. Wood towers with steel bins and concrete silos, tall-as-heck concrete silos. They are like box cars. They all look the same, but they are all so very different. They deal with multiple type of grains, older elevators could also deal in more than just grain. Feed, seed, fertilizer, salt, I have even seen some marked as selling farm supplies.
Particularly I enjoy cooperatives. The one I grew up bu (sorta) was modern, but very interesting. A farmer could fill up his truck with gas, get a load of fertilizer, order some LP for his houses fuel tank, pick up some milk, eggs, butter, and bread for dinner, get the dog food or car food, forget the bird seed, and mail out a letter to his kid living in the big city. What a co-op ey?
My favorite industry? From a model railroading point of view it's harder to narrow down than I thought as so many offer interesting opportunities for modelers. That said, one of the first things I thought of had been the auto industry, I've been thinking much about the auto industry lately. The variety of rolling stock that could come in and go out such as boxcars, gondolas and more.
Alvie
My favorite? Definitely a brewery!!!
Oh, you mean for model railroads? Still a brewery, they receive a variety of cars and can ship out via the railroad, too. A close second is a shipyard or port facility, they will have almost every conceivable car type in use and track going everywhere, sometimes on extremely tight curves.
John
If everybody is thinking alike, then nobody is really thinking.
http://photobucket.com/tandarailroad/
-Morgan
I have two disparate ones.
COAL. Appalachian, because I grew up with it. Love the mines, the hollers, the trains. Now that I'm in Colorado I find Powder River coal operations interesting, too.
PRODUCE. I really like long reefer trains and icing facilities, and also the fields, the packing houses, the canneries.
Hard to fit both in one layout, though!
Sean
HO Scale CSX Modeler
My favorite industry is a steel mill. Coal and coke hoppers, gondols, flat cars, tank cars in and out plus the special cars (slabs and ingots and bottle cars) within the mill. Just a mill can keep a number of people working all day.