Walthers makes a nice HO setup like this ,what about N? I would like to put a ethanol facility on my new layout and am not sure what I could use. I have tons of room and am aquiring more and more of those sweet Athearn 30K Ethanol tankers. I also have plenty of grain hoppers too so I am really starting to look into this to gather some info on what to do. Any ideas?
I highly doubt Walthers wil release the plant in N. We've kicked this same subject around in a couple different forums. The best suggestion I can come up with was the Walthers North Island Refinery, a couple Pikestuff buildings, and Pikestuff and Traincat storage tanks. The evaporators where the hard part and I forget what the solution was.
After looking at the cost of the HO set of buildings and tanks etc. it would cost too much to scratchbuild this in N scale so I'm thinking just some generic tanks and a couple engine sheds converted into grain unloading and a few tracks to park some tank cars and hoppers.
I will scratch build or piece mine together. I have a lot of ethanol cars now and need to start buying the grain hoppers. I took several pictures of huge Brock, Sukup, and GSI metal silos that appear to be 60' in diameter and 80'-90' tall. I had my daughter capture a ring section of the silo's picture that I am calling 4'x8' and had her set it to 1:160 scale and then replicate it vertically. I will print these off in color and then wrap a suitable diameter object with the paper printout. I tool 2 sets of pictures, 1 from the sunny side and one from the shadow side so I can stitch them together if I was worried about the backside which I am not. The plant I am modelling currently has 3 of these monsters along with the rest of the facility. I have 5'-6' foot available for this industry. It along with a refinery and coal originating and terminating in my common East/West staging yard will be the majority of my traffic. The layout is about 12'x14' single deck based on the Indiana Railroad from Robinson to Oblong or Newton, Il. I will the create roofs for the silos based on calculations I saw in MR or here on Trainboard somewhere. I have three tracks in place with the back one spaced further apart so that I can put in a DDGS loading building for outbound feed. I have a RS-2 plant critter that will receive a nice yellow and green paint job to represent an ear of corn in the future. I have the RS-2 and am not ready to talk that project yet.
