What are (all) the steps of transporting materials via boxcar? What type of buildings do I need?

[Anonymous]

I am building a 4 by 8 layout that's modelled in the Northwest. (That was a BIG mistake! Thankfuly a lot of the trees on my layout will be ones that were chain-sawed.)

My railroad is BNSF, but I use BN and SF equipment. My main industry is supplying the stores on my layout by using boxcars.

I was wanting to know what kind of "structures" I need to correctly transport materialson my layout like the real thing. Thanks[%-)][?]

[Jetrock]

Not sure what you mean--lots of "materials" were moved by boxcar--in fact, just about anything that would fit in a boxcar has been shipped in boxcars, including cars, grain, lumber, canned goods, dry goods, manufactured goods, raw materials, and just about anything else.

Most retail stores don't receive materials via rail, unless they are very big stores indeed, at least not in the modern era. Railroads deliver large loads to places like warehouses and intermodal terminals where those materials are transferred to trucks and then shipped to retail stores.

About BNSF: It's perfectly fine to have BN and AT&SF equipment on your BNSF layout--the real BNSF still has plenty of un-repainted BN and AT&SF equipment rolling around (and the UP has lots of stuff still in SP except for numbers, etcetera!)

There are industry kits of all kinds--what sort of industries would you like to model? Think about the stores in your layout (or your town)--what sorts of industries provide goods to those stores? That gives you a starting point for kits to locate for your trackside industries.

If you want to model lots of logged stumps, maybe industries like lumber mills, lumberyards and furniture factories are what you want!

[AntonioFP45]

Jetrock's right on the money with is post.!

A good situation in your favor is that Walther's makes a lot of kits that would suit your needs. The Cornerstone and DPM kits would fit any era between the 1920s and today. Very minor modifications would be needed as far as paint trim signs, etc.,. . There are also some modern buildings that accommodate boxcars.

I'm assuming that you model in HO scale. If so, here are some nice kits that are in the 2005 Walther's HO catalog that you could check out!

Peterson Tool Specialties: Page 441. Modern building. Comes with loading docks for trucks and box cars. Very cool looking. If I were modeling today, this would be one of the first kits I'd get!

Geo. Roberts Printing Inc: Page 442. Brick building. Rail cars actually go "Inside" in the back of the building. Buildings like this still exist today.

Commissary Freight Transfer Bldg.: Page 449. Brick Building. Great potential as it has a nice long dock for boxcars that can be extended, yet as a backwall building it takes up little space! I would Re-letter this building into a Furniture Business. I plan on getting one of these kits. Since you're modeling the modern era, paint the trim in of today's pastel colors like peach or aquamarine. A lot of cities are restoring old buildings like these.

Armstrong Electric Motors: Page 450. Another nice "Backdrop" type building with a long loading dock.

Page 532 has a "slew" of modern concrete buildings that can accommodate boxcars and trucks. These are seen "everywhere" today. These are the grayish white buildings with the vertical concrete "ribs".

To complements kits like these you could have stacks of boxes, pallets and handcarts in the area as well as forklift trucks. Delivery trucks and vans also fit in nicely.

Hope this helps![:D][8D][tup]

[Anonymous]

You need distribution warehouses as indicated in previous postings. There are two major types of warehouses used in the northwest.

One type of warehouse is based on some sort of a rectangular building with loading doors spaced far enough apart that you could spot the longest cars with ther doors closely aligned. This means that as a string of cars is run down the loading siding, each car must be uncoupled as it is spotted in front of a loading door. Sometimes there will be corrugated roofing over the loading doors and the adjacent boxcar.

Another type of warehouse is again based on a rectangular building. In this instance, there is a door in the end of the building where the track runs the full length of the building. The loading dock also runs adjacent to the track for the length of the building. Some of these warehouses have a series of parallel tracks running the length of the building. In large warehouses long strings of cars must be uncoupled about half way down the loading dock to allow for bridges to be dropped for fork truck traffic. This type of warehouse is useful for unloading goods during inclement weather, which is most of the time in the northwest.

All loading docks have metal loading mats that must be placed as bridges from the dock to each car. Fort trucks are used to place and remove the loading mats. Some mates are wider than others depending on the boxcar door configurations. Mats become slick when water is added. Trust me on this, I almost slid all of the way through a boxcar one night. The backend of my "grabber" was hanging out over the tracks with the load and my drive wheel still in the car. Fortunately I was able to crawl over the load, back into the car, and located another "grabber" to safely pull my rig back into the boxcar.

Warehouses sometimes get full. When boxcars arrive the must sit on staging tracks waiting for warehouse floorspace. Rail cars that sit cost businesses money. As soon as cars are emptied they are usually moved to a staging tracks for pickup. I have seen instances where strings of cars were pulled, cars added, cars taken away, and the strings pushed right back into the warehouse. Shippers go nuts pulling and replacing door mats.