Potash Industry: Building(s)?

Greeting Trainzers. I'm wondering what building(s) would best represent a Potash Industry in Trainz? - I use T:ANE by the way.

Initial instinct were some of JRs generic industries. Any ideas would be appreciate. More than happy to kit-bash too.

A trick I use is to look at the dependents of the commodity. On my system that brings up three industries;

<kuid:101046:101735> Fertilizer Factory DES Mod1
<kuid2:439337:100591:1> BI2 Farm Supplies
<kuid:453099:101077> FFR Agri Supplies

It really depends on what era you are looking at though, potash was a major ingredient of soap in the 1800s and early 1900s and was a major commodity for railroads. Especially during the wood burning era when both the railroad and settlers produced potash as a byproduct of burning wood. In more modern times this is more a product of mining and is used in fertilizer. E.G.

bendorsey has done a couple of potash buildings and davesnow has done the fertilizer industry listed above and shown below.

Forrest_Runner, the internet is your friend. I assume you've done an image search using as parameters something like "Potash mine" and the country in which you have an interest in modeling. Modern prototype operations, from the pictures I've seen, are very large operations mining tens of carloads of potash per day, and loading unit trains, usually of covered hoppers. The buildings in the facilities I've seen over the years were quite large. In North America, potash used in agriculture is applied in the spring, and I've seen shipments begin around mid-winter in the US (that is, around Christmas and New Year's), tapering off by about the first of April. In the past few months in the Chicago area, I've seen solid trainloads of Potash, though I don't know that they are technically unit trains, as I suspect in Chicago they may be broken up into smaller blocks for distribution to various points around the upper Widwest. The website of the potash producer Encanto Potash reports that about 95 percent of their production is used in agriculture, and 5 percent for other commercial and industrial uses, including glass making, soap.

There are major agricultural producers (the website mentioned above specifically names China, India, and Brazil) which lack domestic potash sources, and import most of what they need. This suggests the possibility of modeling the other end of the link: a covered shed which will unload the potash, which is sent up a conveyor system to load a bulk freighter.

If I were going to model a Potash producer, I would use the largest warehouse type buildings, with large silos and storage bins. Loading would be relatively simple: a loop track running through a flood loader, with solid trains of covered hoppers running through the loader, until a full train is loaded. I expect that the locomotives used in loading are modified for optimum slow speed operation during loading, and are cut on to the covered hoppers before running through the loader, and are cut off after loading, with high horsepower locomotives handling the road haul. I've seen multiple large buildings and silos that I would use if I were trying to model a producer.

Nope this is of some help.

ns