Larger Industries

TrainBoard is great! It's places like this that make the internet so wonderful.

I just thought of another industrial building kit that looks great. It's a dual scale (HO & N) and comes with pre-colored brick window mullions, etc.- the Heljan Brewery. I'm not sure if it is still being manufactured.

I bought a slightly broken boxed one at a swap meet a few years ago, but I didn't build it yet. It's quite huge in terms of real estate, but It has some awsome kit-bashing potential. All sorts of brick walls, windows, etc.

 

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Alan:
Yes, John, I picked up various dilapidated N scale buildings at a swapmeet recently, mostly Walthers, with bits missing. They were dirt cheap, but I still managed to get the price down

I completely dismantled them, to make, effectively a set of kit parts to build up as building flats, etc.

These functions can be a great source of parts, to make unique buildings.

<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

That's what I found as well --- including ideas for scenicking; especially the tall grass. Remember the article in MR quite a few years back? I don't keep past issues. I hand them off to the elderly residents at a senior housing project.

Good Luck,

John

 

By now you know I like scratch building. A source of ideas information and plans can be found in the public library. For example, I used a book on the oil business to get the ideas that became my oil refinery. My steel mill came from a book about steel. My potash mine came from a book about Saskatchewan minerals. Industries can be designed to fit the space available and it is fun to see how close we can come to creating a miniature of a real industry.
Libraries are a great source of industry information. The best part is libraries are free.

Robin

 

It has been 21 years since the last post on this topic so in the intervening decades; what has changed with regards to availability of larger industries in N-Scale?
Here's an example of a pretty big industry made from a Walther's steel-mill building.

I'm using it as "Stoner's Precision Granite" but I'm sure it could be adapted for other uses.

 

Very nice scene there sd90ns. I have one that I had not made when this thread was originally started. It is an oil refinery that I have put together over the years and it now is on club layout.

3 - Walthers kits
1 - Plastruct kit
1 - scratched FCC unit
1 - scratched coke plant
1 - scratched tankcar loading rack
1 - scratched cooling tower

Here is a daylight shot:


Night shot:


I have made a new "gas flare" unit that needs to be installed :


A lot of time and $$ spent but a great deal of fun and pleasure.

Be well,
Carl

 

That beautiful oil refinery scene reminds me of a petrochemical plant in Houston where I spent two summers, between terms in college, as an insulator's helper, then a painter's helper. Cold stuff gotta be kept cold, and hot stuff gotta be kept hot (or at least kept from getting other stuff hot!)

The 2nd summer, another helper and I spent most of our time painting the breathing air pipes green, per then-new OSHA standards. And cleaning brushes & equipment.

I used those two summers' experience, and that of a summer in a Whirlpool plant, on a refrigerator assembly line, as motivation for studying Electrical Engineering in college. It worked...

 

The "Lost Coast Brewing Co.", started life as a Walther's "Superior Paper".
I chopped the main building in half length-wise and then again width wise wherein I spliced in the other building. What was initially the locus of the two stacks got a throughway cut into it and became the unloading site for covered hoppers hauling whatever grain products are used to make beer. The storage silos for same were recovered from an ancient HO kit of some sort or another I picked-up at a train-show.
I changed the roofline on the brick structure and added a scratch-built cooling tower.


I cut skylights into the sloped roof and painted a "Reflected" sky on the backside. The barrel water tank is a solid wood item I got from Hobby Lobby's crafts department.
Peeking up on the left is one of the light towers that illuminates "Down Below Yard".


Here you can see the downspouts for the rain gutters and the guywires stabilizing the stack as well as the through-tracks for the loading and unloading of rail-shipped products.

 

I like the reflective clouds in the skylights... I never would have thought of that...

 

Carl, your model brings me back to the days when I lived on the "Chemical Coast"...

Hopefully my lungs have cleared up by now.

 

"All Good Things" a company that produces Ice Cream, Candy and Pastries is composed of a couple of Green Max kits with the main building set on a custom built DPM 1st story. The front building houses the offices and serves as a station for the local RDC Commuter service.


The main building consists of two of the same structures spliced together sitting atop that DPM shipping and receiving floor. You can just see the walkway between the office building and the production plant along with some storage tanks set into the S&R floor. Behind the building are three silos that one can assume holds all the necessary dry ingredients needed for the various goodies "AGT" produces.


A roof top view showing the big refrigeration unit used to freeze the ice cream. That is an Alchem brass kit and I wish I could get another of.

 

Two tracks going to the sand a gravel Co. with a third going to the quarry. In the foreground an REM bucket loader is slowly removing the
upper layer of yellow sandstone filling the dump-truck which then backs up to the loading till whereby it gets dumped into an awaiting open
hopper. The "Snow shed isn't used so much to keep snow off the track as it is to keep rocks off.


Seen from another angle you can somewhat see an REM dragline loader and a front-loader in the pit.

 

Since I model a prototype short line, I am attempting to model actual customers of the railroad. Since most N scale kits are not representative of these unique industries, I scratchbuild and kitbash to make the recognizable and look like they justify rail service. Here are a few examples:

 

Very nice! I like all of them, and especially the one in the second photograph. These look a lot like real industries, and have the "heft" needed to make them look like they would actually be rail served!

 

Makes me wonder what the Pink depressed flat bed is for. Looks cute.

 

That depressed center flat car is actually brown, but the morning sun was playing tricks with color rendering and my cell phone. Neeltran rebuilds smaller transformers, which can come in by rail or truck.

Here is a better photo.

 

I recognize a lot of the structures and parts you used here, some of them I used for the "Lost Coast Brewing Co." and I know how long that took to build and how much it cost and this looks to be five times that. YIKES!

 

The problem with larger industries is they have a larger footprint.

The suggestion of a power plant is fine, but a larger power plant uses a LOT more space. The suggestion was a 4-6 ft module. A modern power plant, including the loop can be over a mile square. That's something on the order of 30+ ft in N scale.

Even a really small power plant with a loop is 3000 ft or 18 ft across. A small plant with out a loop, such as the plant just east of Fremont, NE is still a mile long, even if you cut it in half it would still be 15 ft or so in N scale.

One thing people overlook is they all tend to focus on the supply end, wanting to model a coal mine, rather than the demand side. If you model the 1950's or earlier, every town had at least one coal dealer and half the industries had some sort of coal dump to supply coal for a steam plant at the industry themselves. If you model a power plant, you spot ONE cut of 10-20-30 cars and you are done, zero switching. If you model retail coal you can spot those same 30 cars at 10-20 locations and have to do switching at half of them.

One of the reasons I model 1900 is there is a lot smaller industries with many, many, many more opportunities for switching than at a bigger more modern plant.