The Industrial Area

 I have an industrial area on the layout called Junction Yard. The name was a place holder as it is a goods yard next to a junction, so it ended up sticking. Here's an old image. I have just realised that there is not an image showing the whole yard. 

I've been spending a good deal of my fifteen minutes (hours truth be told) thinking about revamping it.

There are a couple of industries that are a little fun.

The first is Two Teachers Brewery. It's a Kibri Paulaner Brewery kit that has been on about three different layouts. Some of it is in a box somewhere but this part, combined with Faller grain storage kit, it looks good. It receives BWH hoppers with grain for the beer making and it sends the beer out in surplus MRCs.

Next is McGuffin Industries. This is another Kibri kit and has been reused a couple of times as well. What does it make? Who knows. A McGuffin is used in a story to move the plot along, such as trying to recover a Maltese Falcon. It could be anything, so long as the characters in the movie want to get it. This makes whatever. It receives all manner of wagons that might need a place to go. It shares the same track as the brewery and are often shunted at the same time.

One industry that I wanted to have is a dairy. There is a corresponding siding on another part of the layout so the transport of milk is essentially confined to the layout without the need for the milk tanks to go into staging. It was scratch built for the last layout in 2019 and fits in well here. The three unbranded Dairy Farmers tanks are swapped with branded Oak milk tanks. The MRC takes bottled milk to other places.

 

These industries have served me well for the last few years, but recently I went though a couple of old boxes and found my NGFF wagons. These are IanLindsay Models kits that I built in the 1990s. In real life they ran from Manildra in NSW to Clyde Yard in Sydney carrying bagged flour. When I plan a layout, I try to fit the stock that I have on it and plan industries for a type of wagon. For the last two layouts, these little fellows have sadly missed out. I was working on a siding on the last layout before its untimely demise. Chatting with one of my mates, he suggested that I could put in a siding next to the dairy as an unloading point. I would need to put in a very extreme low relief building to cater for them. I didn't think that it would be a problem...

...until I went the the Canberra Exhibition last weekend, and found a pack of V/Line flour hoppers in the sale box at SDS. I had seen a photo of these behind a NSW loco, so I reckoned there was a precedent. They look great. I spent the afternoon last Saturday researching what I could. Their time on the standard gauge was probably spent hauling limestone or cement. I already have enough wagons for my cement terminal.

These wagons went loaded from regional Victoria to Melbourne. My afternoon of research landed me on this blog: https://vrballarat.blogspot.com/ I hope the owner doesn't mind me linking it here. On his blog, Greg, the author, describes how he uses these wagons in operating session and has images of how they are loaded.

When I purchased the pack, I though that I would keep one and sell the other two and get my money back on them. I would put it where the NGFF wagons would be unloaded. They are removed and the flour hopper takes their place. Then I had other thoughts. 

I have the wheat silos. Why not have a flour mill next to it? Wheat comes in and flour goes out - bagged and bulk. These three wagons were going to reorganise my freight yard.

Then I remembered my trips to Bomaderry in the 1990s. I would catch the train there and while I was there I would see 48 class locos shunting light blue containers on wagons. I remember seeing flour in some of the corners of the corrugations of the container sides when I was on the train waiting to depart. I later found out that this was containerised flour from the Manildra Group mill. They were top loaded through hatches. The same type of hatches on the Powerline Models containers of the 1990s.

I had some in a box and found some paint. Then I put them on a couple of Silvermaz OCY wagons that I had in a draw waiting for a bit of finishing. I prefer the idea of these containers on short wagons as three wagons looks longer than two. I could pick up three container wagons on one shunt and replace them with the three flour hoppers. For now, here they are. If I go ahead with this, I might need to strip the paint off and try again, you can see the previous paintwork underneath.

I picked up a Walthers Redwing Milling kit to use. I'm still not sure whether I make it as it should be or use both the front and rear walls side by side and the side walls on either end like a low relief building.

Sadly McGuffin Industry will need to go. It can be consigned to a storage box.

The same will happen to the brewery. However, I could use part of another kit to replace it.

The diary, I really want to keep. Maybe, I might have to reduce the the wagons to tanks only.

Here is some thing that I have planned at least. The brown building could be the brewery. The red building on the end is a scenic block to hide trains that are going up the inline. Where it starts on the left is close to the incline - see the image above with the tautliner NGFF wagons.

One thing with this plan though, there isn't a place to load the NGFFs with the containerised flour and the flour hoppers.

What am I going to do? Sit on these thoughts for a bit so that I don't rush into something. Future me is never a big fan of past me and the lack of thought sometimes. I'll ask for advice from friends. I'm thinking of making the flour mill as big as I can and putting a warehouse for the flour where the dairy is in the image above. I might have to remake the dairy, consigning this model to the storage box. 

It's sad for these buildings. They join the others from previous layouts in storage, waiting for a future layout. I reckon that if I get my act into gear, I could finish this by the end of the decade. I also reckon that after I retire, (still a long way off yet) I'll have another layout in me with ideas and lessons learned from this one and spots for buildings

For now, I'll keep running the layout.

Until next time.