I love old factories. The next kit I am developing will be based on one of my all time favorite. We would drive by this all the time when I was a kid on our way to my grandparents' house. I recently learned it was a sugar beet refinery. Here is the first attempt at making it for my layout: I am currently working on plans to make this into three modules, so that you can buy one, two, or all three. Each one will be able to stand on its own. I will also have the smokestack available. The final product will be shorter than the prototype, along with some other minor aesthetic changes. There will be an option between brick, concrete, or a combination. Also I will offer a choice in roofing. I am hoping to have module one ready within the next month or two. Will post progress!
Cool building. Sugar refineries can be a lot of fun to model. However, I only allow pure cane sugar to be refined on my layout.
Spent a lot of hours as a youngster riding my bike down to the Holly Sugar factory to watch this ancient old kettle shove beet cars up the incline to the washout and unloading pit.
That is one cool engine.[/QUOTE] The sugar beet factory was built in 1909 and I believe this loco was the original either coming new or used. It lasted in service until at least 1963 and was replaced finally by a diesel. A little bit of difference between sugar beet processing and sugar cane processing but surprisingly I remember most of what the car traffic into and out of the factory would have been if you are interested and some of the operation. I remember my high school chemistry class had a fairly extensive tour of the processing facilities and the lab. Plus I had spent a lot of time there as a younger lad as I mentioned and one of my favorite fishing holes was in the big lake they had.
Maybe while there are some Holly Sugar experts here, I ought to get a question out. I have two 45 year old Arnold Rapido two-bay "roofed hoppers" lettered for N&W. (Roofed hoppers being prototype cars originally built as open hoppers, modified with roofs added) The models appear to be based on Arnold Rapido's operating open hopper cars with a roof added. I have wondered about possible prototypes. Never found a prototype photo. But I found MODEL photos of a Tyco HO car that looked identical, lettered for Holly Sugar. Know if Holly Sugar ever had anything like these? (I ought to shoot and post a photo to show what they look like)
In all my young years of hanging around the factory and the rail yard watching the loads and empties come and go I have no recollection of ever seeing any type of car lettered for Holly Sugar. Holly's colors were the blue and white with the green holly leaf and red holly berries, and that paint scheme did make it onto a number of their small switchers. In fact I can't even find if Holly actually owned any type of rail car other than small plant switchers. I need to correct and add some to my earlier info. The Holly plant I remember was built in 1925 I confused the date with the start of the lower Yellowstone irrigation canal project that made the beet growing possible. The old steam loco was a former Milwaukee loco built in 1895 and came to the Holly factory when It was already 30 years old and then put almost another 30 plus years in at Holly. Back in the early years there was no OSHA or super strict insurance regs. or sue everybody for any trivial thing culture, so I could roam the plant grounds at will, and the local rail yard not to mention the big stockyard. During the beet harvest season both the NP and the GN stationed engines and crews there for the duration of the harvest so I had a number of first generation GPs and the last of the NP steam to watch go about their chores. With the heavy beet traffic coming in, the grain harvest going out from three elevators, and the fall stock traffic with sheep being brought in the graze and fatten on the now harvested beet fields, it was a young railfan's paradise. So a lot of those operations got burned into a young man's memory.
While my memory is still jogged I thought I would list the car types associated with a sugar beet factory that I observed that would be valid for the 1950's to early 1960s timeframe. The incoming cars would be gondolas and hopper cars all of the drop bottom type. Saw a lot of the composite gondolas scrounged from anywhere they could get clean serviceable cars with some side extensions added to some. Beets were unloaded by pushing up a ramp onto a trestle inside a covered open ended shed. Inside the shed large water cannon that were directed by employees washed the beets out into a serious of troughs underneath the structure. The beets were floated along in a series of concrete lined ditches that ferried the beets into the processing bldg. The unloading shed I witnessed was single ended with cars pushed in and pulled out. Hoppers were mostly used for delivery of coal for the boilers, most likely lignite from NP's mines about 70 miles away. Also limestone and coke were open hopper delivered. Plant made their own lime which the coke was used to heat the limestone to produce lime. Boxcar loads of paper bags for bagging sugar in large bulk bags. and the rare occasional flatcar used to bring in equipment for replacement or upgrades. Outgoing from the plant would be the following, again for the time period listed previously. Boxcars for bagged sugar loading. Covered hoppers for bulk sugar loading mostly two bay at that time. Plain black tank cars for molasses shipping. The molasses was a left over by product after the sugar was extracted and used mainly in feed blends. And finally beet pulp. The beet pulp was the fiber left after slicing and dicing the beets and extracting the juice. Originally it looked like tobacco filler for a cigar and dark brown in color. Some was bagged and boxcar loaded for small batch feed mixing the rest was originally loaded into single door boxcars just like grain was with boards and paper lining the door openings. At some point they started compressing the pulp into pellets and then it was loaded into covered hoppers. Basically this pretty well sums up what rolling stock would be found at a plant site with most of the cars being the gons and single door boxes. Only a few coal limestone and coke hoppers would be on the site at a time and just a few tank cars. Depending on one's layout size modeling a sugar beet facility would also include a remote beet dump besides the factory beet dump. The beet piles were about forty feet high and at least 100 feet wide by hundreds of feet long and located beside remote sidings off the main. A large tracked conveyor rig with a truck scale mounted on it handled the unloading and stacking. Farm trucks with side hinged dump beds would pull onto the scale and the cables hooked to one side to lift and dump the bed into a side trough from were it fed the stacking conveyor. The same piece of equipment was at the factory for famers close to the factory to direct deliver. Railcars were loaded by big front end loaders and picked up about twice a day. Power for those trains were normally a single NP steam 2-8-2 or a pair of GP units either 7s or 9s. The same front end loaders service the stockpiles of beets at the factory dumping their bucket loads in a trough at the rail dump site. The factory I was familiar with had 5 remote dumps, all rail serviced by either GN or NP plus the one at the factory and the dumps spread out over about 100 miles of territory in the valley. Time period as to modeling a working factory would be from about October to late spring when the last of the stockpiles had been depleted. And the beets that I am familiar with were huge with some specimens being more than a foot across, another modeling challenge maybe. The only cars present at the factory after that time period would be some boxcars being loaded and the occasional open hopper of coal for the factory power plant. Since the beet cars were railroad owned they would not be present during the off season but back into their regular service. To me it might be easier to model a cane sugar plant since I would think to take a page from a lumber mill or paper plant with cold deck log storage modified instead to sugar cane stockpiles. Also thinking about ancillary structures besides those listed there would be silos or grain bins to hold dried beet pulp and quite possibly some tanks to hold excess beet juice prior to the cooking process.
The Micro-Trains 039/39000 body style looks like it could be a stand in for the SP boxcars in the second picture from the top. The Atlas double sheathed boxcar model might work as well. It's a bit too hard to see the ends of the cars in the image in order to estimate which would be closer.
Yes, it does... but unfortunately it doesn't help the cause. The ends on the prototype car don't look much like either the MTL car or the Atlas car. So 'stand in' it would be.
