02-19-2014, 10:11 AM
Brakie, I went to the site that you say supports your view: the NS stats say it moved about 175,000 total cars in the latest week. It moved about 15,000 boxcars. My calculator puts boxcars at less than 9% of the total. I said earlier that you would be lucky to find 10% boxcars in a train. As far as I can see, the stats you point me to prove me correct.
In addition, as a couple of people have pointed out, the number of boxcars in a train varies by region and industries served. So some trains serving the auto industry will be boxcar heavy, while others will as a result wind up with fewer, resulting in trains like the one I observed in another post with more like 5% boxcars. I'm not sure how I'm inaccurate in anything I'm saying here.
You say I should research industrial parks. The city of Vernon, CA, is basically one big industrial park, and it bears out what I'm saying. (I go there frequently and take pictures. It's also worth pointing out that it's nearly the last of many such places in my area -- El Segundo, Wingfoot, The Patch, Downtown, etc, are all gone.) Here is a photo I added in another thread showing part of this area:
The tracks along the lower edge here are the alley arrangement I posted in the photo at the bottom of the last page. To repeat, they are empty, and many of the buildings are for rent or sale. Note the massive empty parking lot. There is one industry left in all this trackage, a grain distributor at lower right that receives covered hoppers. I challenge you to find a single boxcar in this whole alley-type area. "Back in the day" they drove Ford Galaxies that got 12 mpg on 25-cent a gallon gas. Things change. Guilford's GP40s came in the 1990s.
Alcanman refers to a video of a train serving a paper mill in Maine, but this bears out what I say as well. The mills are served by heavy bulk operations, not two-car locals. Yes, they ship paper in boxcars. However, this paper does not go to onesie-twosie warehouses -- the same boxcars are running in quantity through places like Virginia. They are not being dropped off by locals in fictitious New England "industrial parks". I repeat, the Guilford main line runs through rural areas almost exclusively and bypasses Boston entirely. Guilford has only a few locals in Massachusetts, and if you find them on Youtube, they do not serve generic warehouses.
People are entitled to build their own layouts, and I suppose if you live thousands of miles away and want to say America is the way you want to see it, you're entitled to do that, too. But again, don't claim you're modeling the prototype.
In addition, as a couple of people have pointed out, the number of boxcars in a train varies by region and industries served. So some trains serving the auto industry will be boxcar heavy, while others will as a result wind up with fewer, resulting in trains like the one I observed in another post with more like 5% boxcars. I'm not sure how I'm inaccurate in anything I'm saying here.
You say I should research industrial parks. The city of Vernon, CA, is basically one big industrial park, and it bears out what I'm saying. (I go there frequently and take pictures. It's also worth pointing out that it's nearly the last of many such places in my area -- El Segundo, Wingfoot, The Patch, Downtown, etc, are all gone.) Here is a photo I added in another thread showing part of this area:
The tracks along the lower edge here are the alley arrangement I posted in the photo at the bottom of the last page. To repeat, they are empty, and many of the buildings are for rent or sale. Note the massive empty parking lot. There is one industry left in all this trackage, a grain distributor at lower right that receives covered hoppers. I challenge you to find a single boxcar in this whole alley-type area. "Back in the day" they drove Ford Galaxies that got 12 mpg on 25-cent a gallon gas. Things change. Guilford's GP40s came in the 1990s.
Alcanman refers to a video of a train serving a paper mill in Maine, but this bears out what I say as well. The mills are served by heavy bulk operations, not two-car locals. Yes, they ship paper in boxcars. However, this paper does not go to onesie-twosie warehouses -- the same boxcars are running in quantity through places like Virginia. They are not being dropped off by locals in fictitious New England "industrial parks". I repeat, the Guilford main line runs through rural areas almost exclusively and bypasses Boston entirely. Guilford has only a few locals in Massachusetts, and if you find them on Youtube, they do not serve generic warehouses.
People are entitled to build their own layouts, and I suppose if you live thousands of miles away and want to say America is the way you want to see it, you're entitled to do that, too. But again, don't claim you're modeling the prototype.