Reccomended industries for a route I'm working on

I'm building a Model Railroadz route and I need some advice. First off, the route was originally a tourist railroad, but I decided to add some industries to it to represent a railroad that hauls freight and runs tourist trains. The setting is the problem: The Appalachian Mountains in the present day. The problem is that I'm trying to provide variety of industries served by the railroad and not just hauling coal. The railroad has invested in getting more customers so that they're not just relying on natural resources, which is coal and lumber. I've got industries served by coal hoppers, log cars, flatcars, tank cars, and boxcars. I'm trying to figure out what industries I could have that could use gondolas and closed-top hoppers. Here's a few examples of how I've set up the industries:
Logs from lumber camp -> logs to lumber mill -> lumber to furniture factory -> furniture to interchange with other railroad and/or freight depots and/or warehouses
Logs from lumber camp -> logs to lumber mill -> lumber to freight depot
Logs from lumber camp -> logs to lumber mill -> lumber to interchange with other railroad
Logs from lumber camp -> logs to lumber mill -> lumber to transload platform (aka team track)
Coal from coal mine -> coal to coaling tower
Coal from coal mine -> coal to interchange with other railroad
Boxcars and flatcars to/from freight depot and/or warehouses and/or transload platform (aka team track)
Tank cars to/from fuel distributor
Closed-top hoppers, boxcars, tank cars, and flatcars to/from transload platform (aka team track)
Any other ideas?

Some type of rock quarry maybe.

Also, you can use gondolas to ship wood chips from your lumber mill. With my Lumber/Sawmill I have logs in, lumber, pulpwood, pulp bales, & wood chips out. The latter 3 go to Pulp n Paper Mill, with the Boxcars of Paper from the Mill going to printing companies and across the country. Also bring various chemicals into the Mill with Tank cars.

Here's a link to a video made by Mike's Trainz that shows him building a Pulp & Paper Mill - very well done I might add - https://youtu.be/_j6-caquSJs

This is my suggestiion for the covered hoppers and gons. Hoppers, Go for things like metal ores from mines. The covered hoppers could be used to protect the ore from the elements. Run these to smelting plants or metal processing facilities and have the gons and flats carry sheets and coils of the metals to your distribution yards and/or manufacturing to create things that use metals, like automobile parts, filing cabinets, industrial equipment components... You could also use the gons to removed cooled waste slag from the plants to be sent to disposal facilities. Once the metals are delivered to manufacturing, the gons at this point can also take away things like car frames, heavy equipment parts, engines... to be sent to be assembled at assembly lines, and scrap metals to be returned to the plants and facilities to be recycled into the next batch of metals.

Or..

Hoppers carry things like sand, concrete powders, mortar powders, to be turned into concrete blocks and slabs, bricks, any masonry type building materials.

Or if you are daring...

Hoppers carry raw, dried animal droppings to be processed into fertilizers and nutrient rich soils Which are palletized and flat/gonned for dairy and farming in the NE segment of US Appilacia.

I offer these ideas as they are at least semi-prototypical or fully prototypical of where I was raised. (CT.) I'm not sure as to what is done around the bible belt or farther South from there that uses these railcars.

Covered hoppers for plastic pellets and also for agricultural products, such as fertilizers and feed, and for outbound grain, corn, soybeans, and other products outbound. For the accompanying plastics company you can use a simple warehouse type building with some silos trackside. Agricultural businesses will have tanks, bins, and silos as you'd expect.

Tank cars can also carry corn oil or chemicals such as chlorine for paper mills where they bleach the paper. There should also be tanks filled with clay slurry or hoppers full of white clay for the paper making process.

There could be some small cement/concrete plants, even small machine shops and metal shops that require plate steel, coils, and other freight. These industries don't need to be modeled in their entirety so having a few representative buildings all crowded together to represent a mill complex can be enough.

And finally, though there's more than this, this all that comes to mind at the moment, a propane or other fuel dealer. Propane is very common in these areas and so is home heating oil. The propane is brought in by big long tanks and the associated business has long cylindrical tanks as well. The oil doesn't need to be a lot bigger than one of those old-fashioned raised tanks on the concrete feet, which we still see from time to time in various places even where the tracks are long gone.

Okay, I've added a cement plant at one end of the route. I remembered that Southern's Murphy Branch (now the Great Smoky Mountains Scenic Railroad) used to have a cement plant near Bryson City, North Carolina. Also, I've located against a wall in front of where the interchange yard punches thru the wall into a staging area for a train from another railroad to come in, work the interchange, and then exit back behind the wall. I'm going to add another staging yard at the other end of the route to simulate the route continuing on beyond the room. I haven't decided on exactly how the railroad works. I'm thinking of several different scenarios:
1. As a bridge route connecting two different railroads.
2. Connects to the same railroad at both ends and serves as a 'shortcut' between the two places on the other railroad.
3. As a railroad that connects to a large railroad at one end and another, smaller railroad at the end that the cement plant is.
4. Same as #3, but instead is a model of a branchline of a railroad larger than the smaller railroad at the end that the cement plant is, but smaller than the railroad represented by the staging yard.
I'm leaning towards #3 or #4, because the interchange yard is only two tracks. That's a bit small to represent a larger railroad which is why I'm leaning towards #3 and #4.

#3 or #4 I think too offer some interesting operations. The smaller railroad, or the branch line interchanging with the bigger mainline will also give you an excuse or reason to run foreign power.

Suppose this is the Southern railroad and your branch line/short line operation interchanges with the Southern. You can have Southern GP40s or even modern NS equipment interchanging with your smaller company. Whether this equipment lingers long on the route is another story, I don't know how this is setup so I'm supposing there are two staging yards or portals on either end to produce and consume outside world traffic.

On one of my routes, actually a merger of a few routes and some in between building, I have a former DRGW branch line interchange with the modern UP. The modern UP runs through from one portal to another and I grab a train and interchange with the through freight various freight cars in the yard. Once I've done interchanging, I send the mainline train on its way and I'm off running the 46 mile branch which has two coal mines at the very end plus a few grain silos, plastics companies, and other industries along the way. The run to the end is usually an empty coal train which brings down some empty hoppers for the mines that have placed filled hoppers on the interchange tracks. The very end of the line has a very small yard and a warehouse and a station. During the weekends, I schedule a tourist train which runs on the branch up to the mainline and back. During some good operating sessions, I've had this route running for well over 6 hours.

You can transport perishables in 2 bay covered hoppers. Since you are in the north east Apples would be good.

KenRuof said:

You can transport perishables in 2 bay covered hoppers. Since you are in the north east Apples would be good.

Click to expand...

No, not the north east, but the southeast, particularly somewhere in western Virginia, West Virginia, or eastern Kentucky. I really like coal hauling railroads and routes featuring a coal hauling railroad, particularly Southern, Norfolk & Western, Chesapeake & Ohio, Virginian, Clinchfield, Interstate, Buffalo Creek & Gauley, Kentucky & Tennessee, Norfolk Southern and CSX. I also like these railroads because I have relatives living just south of the Tri-Cities area, which are Kingsport, Tennessee, Johnson City, Tennessee, and Bristol, Virginia/Tennessee. Southern and Norfolk and Western used to connect to each other in Bristol, and the Clinchfield passed thru Kingsport. I've also been to Natural Tunnel State Park, which is just outside Duffield, Virginia, and to get there I pass by the Clinchfield's massive Copper Creek Bridge. I've also got distant relatives that live in the town of Big Stone Gap, Virginia that I've only visited once. It was the early 2000's, when coal was still king, and at the time a coal train had derailed in town. I think the reason we went there for a birthday party for the relative. However, me and my cousin decided to leave the party and go check out the yard just across the street from the building the party was going on. The yard was pretty much empty, though there were a small consist of coal hoppers sitting in the yard. While we were there, a lone Norfolk Southern diesel passed by. From what I remember about the diesel, it was a GE Dash 9-40CW, as it had a GE wide cab and didn't have the radiators that GEVOs have.

Now if you want your mind blown while railfanning in southwestern Virginia . . .

Check out Natural Tunnel State Park. It's the only naturally made railroad tunnel at least in America, if not the world. It's billed as one of the Seven Natural Wonders of The World. July 15th is the only day of the year that Norfolk Southern, the owner of the tracks thru the tunnel, opens the tunnel to the public. When they do this you can actually walk thru the tunnel, from one end to the other. This tunnel was made by Stock Creek starting during the Ice Age, slowing eroding away a crack in Purchase Ridge to create this unique creation. The railroad tracks where laid thru the tunnel in 1893 by the Virginia & Southwestern, which would eventually become part of the Southern. The tunnel that the diesel passes thru at the end is man-made, unlike Natural Tunnel. Coal trains go thru this tunnel on a daily basis, though not as many since the demand of Appalachian coal dropped. There's two ways to get to the tunnel: a narrow gravel trail that zig-zags down into the gorge, or a chairlift that you have to pay to use.