Starting to plan my own layout for a change was looking back at MR's Salt lake Route and came up with one conclusion. It seems an odd place (on the map) to have a furniture maker. So this brings me to my query. Going with plausibility over prototypically, what rail industries would be more appropriate for a Utah desert city?
Just east is the Wasatch National Forest. Plenty of trees in the near by area. You can see the green from Google Earth.
I'll try this one, since I live out here in the UT desert...
One thing to start - I was never a big fan of this particular project layout, since the scenery and industry didn't represent the prototype well at all in my opinion. It just doesn't look like UT or NV. I'd suggest looking at Google maps or equivalent for the entire route, and check things out on Street View to get a feel for the places that interest you.
Industries vary between railroads. The real "Salt Lake Route" had or has typical urban area industry in the cities like Las Vegas and the Wasatch Front (Salt Lake, Provo, etc.); distribution centers, steel fabrication, chemicals, etc. Something like a furniture factory would fit in here, but not in the middle of nowhere like on the layout where there isn't a local supply of lumber.
Some of the larger towns have agriculture and business that you would associate with it (think Milford and Delta in UT), feed mills, elevators and such. Milford has a lot of pig farms, and there's a big concrete elevator off to the edge of town near the yard. There used to be several agricultural branches emanating from around Delta. Take a look at this site http://www.pbase.com/sanoyes/elevator_west and scroll down to the photos of elevators and such at Milford, Delta, Llyndl, Cedar City and so on. Argribusiness is found wherever there's enough water to irrigate crops and feed cattle, sheep or pigs.
US Steel had a major integrated steel mill at Geneva near Provo, UT. http://utahrails.net/industries/geneva-steel.php It's almost all gone now but looked like what you might imagine a steel mill to be, with blast furnaces, rolling mills and so on. Lots of steel fabrication industries still located in the area used product from Geneva to make trusses, beams, pipes, grinding balls and all sorts of other stuff. Today these are fed from other sources, such as the Nucor plant on UP's Malad branch near the UT/ID border at Plymouth http://www.nucor.com/products/locations/us/.
Mineral industries are common. Graymont has a lime plant south of Delta called the "Cricket Mountain" facility on their site http://www.graymont.com/locations_cricket.shtml . There's also the Chemical Lime Co. plant at Apex, just north of Las Vegas. Just west of Salt Lake is the Kennecott copper smelter, which is a BIG industry http://www.kennecott.com/. Precious metal mining was common in some areas, like the Euraka/Tintic district in UT, where both the UP and D&RGW had branch lines. Other smaller mines used to ship from railheads at various locales, including Milford, the Pioche branch that took off from Caliente, NV and a few others. US Steel used to get iron ore from a branch line to the Cedar City, UT area. The open pit mines are still easy to see on the mountains west of town. Martin Marietta put a good sized cement plant in Leamington Canyon, UT at a place called Martmar on the railroad - it's now operated by Ash Grove Cement. There's a massive concrete loader adjacent to the track, and most of the plant is across the main highway, so selecvtive compression would work well. Limestone quarries provided stone for Geneva. There are no coal mines along the Salt Lake Route itself, but there's a loadout at Sharp, UT that generates unit trains from coal that's trucked in http://www.rrpicturearchives.net/showPicture.aspx?id=534055.
There are a couple of large coal-fired power plants that receive unit trains of coal from UT and CO mines. One is the Intermountain Power Project north of Delta, and another is the plant at Moapa, NV.
The Tooele Army Depot in UT had quite a bit of rail traffic in the past, and a maze of track that would make for some interesting switching.
Once you venture off the Salt Lake Route proper, you find other industry like salt plants (Cargill and Morton have plants on the former Western Pacific), magnesium extraction (Magcorp's facility at Rowley, UT), and potash (a plant at Wendover, UT). There's a waste incineration faciltiy at Aragonite, UT that received rail service http://www.cleanharbors.com/locations/index.asp?id=43, as well as a toxic/nuclear waste disposal facility almost next to it at Clive http://energysolutions.com/customer-portal/clive .
Rob Spangler
Eric97123 Just east is the Wasatch National Forest. Plenty of trees in the near by area. You can see the green from Google Earth.
Most of that forest isn't anything that's harvested for lumber or useful commercially if it was harvested. There are a lot of small trees like scrub oak (Gambell oak), bigtooth maple and junipers that make up most of the green you see on the maps. A large proportion are 15-20 feet tall or less. There is some timber harvest from coniferous forests in the Wasatch Plateau to the south and east, and from the Uinta Mountains. The project layout plopped a furniture plant where there's really nothing local to use, unless they wanted to make furniture out of junipers, and no population to justify bringing in the wood by truck or rail. The urban Salt Lake City area does have furniture factories, mostly using wood from non-local sources.
Maybe they make modern furniture out of steel tubing and plastic. Or get teak in containers from Malaya. However, in a town of twenty-four hundred people, fifty miles from anything and not on or near any major highways...
Seriously, if you use the name North Las Vegas instead of Caliente you can legitimately include a concrete batch plant, a paper cup factory(!), several propane dealers (Look, Ma, weiners on wheels!) and a train-truck transload facility, as well as several anonymous warehouse-type buildings and an intermodal yard on a reverse loop. You could also put downtown Sin City on your backdrop. Granted that the tunnel country is 'way north, but any layout involves selective compression.
I do beg to differ with Ron, who says that the countryside doesn't look right. If all you can model is the space between the right-of-way fences, the terrain will NEVER look right. I didn't see any glaring anachronisms (other than the bridge, which is way overkill for a dry wash.)
Chuck (North Las Vegas resident modeling Central Japan in September, 1964)
tomikawaTTI do beg to differ with Ron, who says that the countryside doesn't look right. If all you can model is the space between the right-of-way fences, the terrain will NEVER look right. I didn't see any glaring anachronisms (other than the bridge, which is way overkill for a dry wash.)
Hey Chuck - how scenery hits us is subjective. I didn't think the project layout scenery looked like Caliente or the Meadow Valley Wash. Something about it just bugged me. I agree the bridge scene didn't pull off as well as it could have because it crossed a small side drainage and wasn't landscaped into a central channel from the wash. There are substantial bridges in the area modeled, although not necessarily good matches for the model used.
UP has several truss and girder spans in the wash and around Caliente like this http://www.rrpicturearchives.net/showPicture.aspx?id=2730487 . They also have some large bridges crossing the often dry Mojave River nearby in CA that served as prototypes for the brass truss bridges from BLMA http://www.rrpicturearchives.net/showPicture.aspx?id=2850366 and http://www.blmamodels.com/cgi-bin/webstore/shop.cgi?ud=BQAEBwkNAAYCBxQUEBEcHAEACQMIBAwECQkTEQAA&t=main.blue.htm&storeid=1&cols=1&categories=01001-00021&&c=detail.blue.htm&t=main.blue.htm&itemid=5002.
A few shots in the article do include a center beam flat of dimensional lumber being "delivered" to the furniture plant. I do agree with everyone so far that the double-track steel through-truss bridge is a bit over bearing, but I also think the mini-tunnel in the middle of the wash was unneeded either.
I'm still planning ideas for a first layout which is why I went and took a look back at this one. I have not built a layout yet.
BerkshireSteam A few shots in the article do include a center beam flat of dimensional lumber being "delivered" to the furniture plant.
A few shots in the article do include a center beam flat of dimensional lumber being "delivered" to the furniture plant.
That part makes sense. Locate the industry in an urban area or a smaller town very close by and it would be plausible. Outside of an older downtown core, the building would possibly fit in best if modeled as a one-story concrete or metal pre-fab structure.
BerkshireSteam It seems an odd place (on the map) to have a furniture maker. So this brings me to my query. Going with plausibility over prototypically, what rail industries would be more appropriate for a Utah desert city?
It seems an odd place (on the map) to have a furniture maker. So this brings me to my query. Going with plausibility over prototypically, what rail industries would be more appropriate for a Utah desert city?
It probably wasn't a desert until the furniture maker cut all the trees down.