Can anyone give a rundown of what inbound and outbound traffics you would logically find at a rail served flour mill? Obviously i'm guessing grain inbound (covered hoppers) and flour outbound (bagged in boxcars, bulk in airslides etc) Any other thoughts and suggestions? Any by products or other ingredients that the railroad would need to move? TIA
Machinery replacements for the mill. Boxcars of bags for the finished flour. Some kind of car for chlorine dioxide (used to bleach flour). And presumably a graincar to haul away leftover grain bits like bran (for white bread) and grit.
Possible spots: Clean Out Feed Loading Grain Unloading Bulk Flour Loading Supplies Receiving Bagged Flour Loading Grain Testing Wolfgang
Thanks Guys, i'll have to research what sort of car (tank car presumably?) they ship Chlorine Dioxide in!
The Con-Agra plant here in Sherman recieves inbound shipments of wheat (they use an ex-GTW SW9 as a switcher, operated by remote control), and ships wheat midds (leftover from the wheat processing) outbound. They were shipping flour outbound in Airslide hoppers, but have recently switched to trucks. The wheat comes in on an ex-MKT branch served by DGNO, while what outbound rail shipments of flour went by BNSF off of their ex-Frisco line. Thus, two railroads involved in working the mill, but you could just as easily have one railroad (or the in-plant switcher, say a small EMD goat or GE critter) take care of business. In a model RR context, it's not a stretch to ship outbound flour bagged or bulk as well as inbound wheat or whatever else is needed for the milling process. A Walthers kit for the mill, and a Walthers ADM grain elevator for wheat storage (and perhaps the use of a Pikestuff kit or two) would be great starting points for a flour mill. On a model RR, be it home-based or sectional, again you could have an in-plant switcher doing the grunt work, and let the interchanging RRs drop off & pick up cars. Heck, it could be a small layout in itself.
Great model Railroads had an issue about modular industries a couple years back. You may want to see if yuo can dig up a copy because it had a flour mill as one of the examples.
