After being away from the hobby for a couple of years, I am trying to come up with a new layout. I am wanting to base it off of the south west in the early to mid 60's. Most of the layout will be desert and mountain terrain. My problem is that I don't have any idea of what kind industries that would be realistic for that area and time. The industries will be in a small town if possible. Any ideas for industries?
Most small southwest towns do not have a lot of in-town industry. That is why they are still small. Remember, also, that small industries do not generate enough traffic to warrant rail service. One in-town "industry" you can support is a team track with a small crane. Most industries that support nearby small towns are extractive industries, mines of some sort. The southwest supplies any number of mineral products including coal and oil.
Mustangman79, I also was thinking of some sort of mine. Having spent a few years in El Paso and Tucson, mines and hydroelectric (dams) are the only industries I recall. If you were a few miles east, you could do anything conected with oil/natural gas
I like the idea of mines and a team track. I was thinking that maybe a really small railcar repair shop would work too.
Mines are a big one. Pair a gypsum mine with a drywall plant, and you can run loaded centerbeams out, boxcars out (bagged gypsum) and hoppers out, and run empties of all the above in, plus the occasional flat car with machinery. Another one you can put just about anywhere is a scrap facility. Put a airfield in the backdrop and call it The Boneyard. Depending on where in the Southwest, you can also go for agriculture, and you can drop a autocarrier facility any ol' where you please. In Henderson, NV there is a massive titanium plant that's been part of a bigtime industrial complex built during WW2, no reason you can't figure the same was done anywhere else you choose. The complex also includes some chemical plant and used to include a rocket fuel plant, until that blowed up real good!
Here's the video of which you speak: I think only one person was killed though many were injured. As far as industries in the SW - couldn't you have a produce paking plant of some sort. Aren't there a couple of valleys that are heavy in agriculture? Eric
Mining traffic would be the most obvious choice, as others have already stated. There is a fascinating book that came out two or three decades ago titled Rails to Carry Copper that is about the Magma Arizone Railroad, a shortline that connected copper mines in Superior, AZ, with a SP branchline running east of Phoenix. See if you can find a copy of this book- it has a lot of good information- and photos- of what a small mining railroad looked like in your time frame. Back in the early 1980's Model Railroader ran a series of articles authored by John Olsen on building an HO scale railroad set in the Jerome, AZ area that he called the Jerome & Southwestern. Fascinating little railroad...I loved it! Kalmbach later gathered all of the articles into a book titled Building an HO Model Railroad With Personality that is long out of print but is worth it if you can find it. Cement is another big business that you could look into. Coal loads in, cement loads out. You would see agricultural traffic, if you happen to be in one of the few fertile valleys. You could also expect to see some livestock still moving by rail into the 1960's. The one industry that no one has mentioned yet is lumber. This may raise some eyebrows...but in my defense I will point to the vast Ponderosa pine forests found in the upper elevations of both Arizona and New Mexico. Flagstaff was a sawmill town for many years, and even had an active logging railroad well into the 1960's. Some of the grades those logging railroads built can still be found not far from the south rim of the Grand Canyon. The Apache over south of Holbrook used to run to a sawmill and logging camps deep in the White Mountains, and their truncated system today continues to haul primarily paper...even though there is hardly a tree in sight of their railroad. New Mexico used to have a few logging railroads and produce lumber, and at one time the lumber industry provided quite a bit of traffic to the D&RGW narrow gauge in southern Colorado and northern New Mexico. Jeff Moore Elko, NV
One of the better 'industries' would be to model an interchange with another shortline carrier - allowing you to have some variety in power, equipment, etc., without modeling the whole deal. Apache Railroad with those C420's sticks in my mind; Southwest Forest Industries at Flagstaff had that 60's railroad; the key is that you need the interchange track and a way to get the shortline 'off scene'. I'm sure there are a lot more. On the Third District layout, Flagstaff is a hotspot, as it is in real life. They still base a switcher there. One of my favorite desert industries is the 'cinder pit', in the area of Flagstaff there's a big pit at Winona (Darling) that's been there forever and is where ATSF gets all that funky-colored reddish/blackish/brownish ballast from, that has a volcanic basalt base. It is also used for making cinderblocks in Phoenix, so it outbounds loads for both railroad and non-railroad use. On my layout, I put in a spur that ducks behind a hill, and put the industry on the backdrop (its half a mile away from the main anyway, and visible in the distance from the main line) - one way to avoid the entire mess. Also remember that the railroad is sometimes its own best customer in the desert. ATSF had to haul water. And lots of ballast, track materials, work trains, etc. About half of my industrial switching at Winslow is for fuel loads, sand, rail, ties, work train stuff, and the LCL freight house (which was actually active at both Winslow and Flagstaff well into the early 70's). If you're modeling a main line, another great industry is ICE for refrigerator trains. Winslow had enormous icing platforms up until about 1970. Ogden, UT was another big show for icing.
As mentioned, coal mining, potash mining, gypsum mining, and copper mining, oil & gas and agriculture (especially cattle) are all appropriate and will vary a biy from state to state and within each state. In a few places, CO2 was produced from natural gas wells, converted into dry ice at small plants, and either shipped it to market or put it directly into reefer trains that pulled into a siding at the dry ice plant - this type of operation continued into the mid-1960's in places. In southwest Texas, there was/is a sizeable sulfur mine that utilized unit trains of tank cars - hot water was injected underground and turned the crystalline sulfur into a liquid that was pumped to the surface and into insulated tank cars and then shipped to market - some of the tank trains go to the Texas coast where the molten sulfur is transferred into insulated ships that take the sulfur, still in liquid form, overseas. The tank cars look like pretty normat 38-40 ft tankers of the era. In a few places helium gas was produced from natural gas wells - this requires a small plant at the surface to separate the helium from the other gas components but would allow you to use some of those nifty helium tankers that ER Models used to sell. So there are lots of choices depending on whether you like cattle cars, hoppers, tank cars, etc. Many of the small western towns owed/owe their existence to either agriculture/cattle or natural resource extraction. No reason you can't have both agriculture and a mining operation. Kinda depends on whther you like strings of hoppers, cattle cars, reefers, or tank cars.
As others have made clear the southwest has lots of traffic potential. I can only agree with suggestions by others. Timber in the high country, mining in the south, and cattle just about everywhere. ^0s is a great time period for local traffic.
I have spent a considerable amount of time on the deserts of Utah, Nevada, and Idaho and I would like to add one caution to adding these extractive industry locations. The towns that support the mines are seldom close to the mine and its loadout. In the small dusty town all you might see is a turnout for the spur/branch to the mine (not even a wye on the turnout). There may be a couple of storage tracks for empties, etc. Not all mines/mills ship daily. The towns usually are fairly nondescript wtih a couple of two-story brick buildings, a few frame buildings, and not a lot of "central planning" in their layout. In other words, perfect for a model railroad. Also with connecting shortlines, they will usually have the maintenance facilities out at the mine/mill site so you would not see much beyond the interchange and a couple of storage tracks.
Sugarbeets! One cash crop that supported farmers in many semi-arid parts of the southwest was sugar beets. Before corn syrup came to dominate food processing sugar from beets and sugar beets were a steady source of income. What is the dominant feature of sugar beet processing? The huge mill required to boil the beets and and cure the sugar juice. The beets themselves would come from the farmers in trucks or wagons but the mill required chemicals and a way to ship bagged sugar to market. There is still the shell standing of the huge mill at preston, Idaho. And a construction company uses a mill building for storages between Provo and Payson, Utah. The mills supported the farmers locally in the days before centralized processing and canning.
You can probably find out some very specific info about what kinds of companies worked in whatever area you speak of. South west is huge. Exactly where in the south west? I just spent two days in southern Colorado. Because of the way the geography works out it's sort of the upper edge of the southwest. There are still the remains of a large smelter of some kind down there in Salida. They had iron mines in the San Louis valley too. I had a chance to speak to an older guy down there who remembered the trains from back in the 50's. He said a major commodity was cattle from those parts. There were other commodities, but I am not sure of the time span for those. They may have still been mining silver out of there in the 60's. The San louis valley still grows hops for Coors beer, and there is a rail line there. For a short line it would be a fairly interesting prototype during the 60's. Work backwards and decide what kind of trains you like to run. If you like ore trains then provide a ore mine of some kind. If you like cattle cars, well then lots of trackside cattle loaders. Don't forget that even if the only thing being produced is one commodity, people still need fuel and machinery delivered, not to mention food. Look at maps of the area you are interested in. Town names should really help give you an idea of what is down there.
When I lived in El Paso Asarco was still working. They were a smelting operation. And Safeway stores had a large distribution center that was rail served...
I'm really late to this thread, but all of the above suggestions are better described than I could do. I'd add tourism in the 60s (and now) with some tacky road signs. There was also uranium mining and processing, with lots of "yellow-cake" processed and shipped in hoppers. And adobe-making enterprises--fields of mud bricks drying in the sun.
I'm very late to this thread, but since I found some good ideas for industries in it, wanted to share what I had figured and/or tracked down. I also am interested in Southwestern U.S. RR's... my freelance RR (Colorado, Arizona & Western - CAW reporting marks) is set in an earlier era than yours - 1950's - and is allegedly a 'bridge' line that connected D&RGW to AT&SF (in Holbrook, AZ; Hey, it's my version of the history, in which a businessman in Cortez, CO was ticked that the D&RGW wouldn't connect to his town. ;-) But someone posted mention of John Olson's Jerome & Southwestern model railroad; due to my not finding my first copy of the book, I bought a second copy off eBay. So far as I'm concerned, if you want the book, I would sell the extra copy at 20 percent of the list price of 7.95 (I'll look at what postage would run - that would be additional). Think about it and let me know if you'd be interested. As for the industries, some industries I will be having for my RR (Colorado, Arizona & Western - CAW) include lumber (there's a town named Sawmill near the AZ-NM border - I forget which side), and uranium/vanadium mining in the Chuska Mountains (hauled to Farmington, NM where I believe there actually was a uranium buyer/company - possibility of using glow-in-the-dark paint on my miners walking out of the mine at shift's end! ;-) LOL I'm also toying with the idea of some early manufacturer of transistors (I'll need to research when they were first developed, and if silicon/sand was actually a component used in manufacturing them. And a la John Allen, I will have Acme Manufacturing, since Road Runner cartoons were set in the Southwest, and Wiley E. Coyote was always ordering things from the Acme Company in them... Plus some gravel, rock, etc., and transfer of goods from the D&RGW south, or other goods from California out heading northeasterly to Colorado. That's my history of things, anyway! JimRCGMO
