L&N Industrial Rail Spur

[FCIN]

Another vote for plan 1

I hate to be so unoriginal but the addition of another car type is alwasy interesting.

The other advantage is that it could be modeled without a real building, just a concrete area with a fence. I have even seen where there is no dock and they just use forklifts. If they get a boxcar they unload as much as possible with one forklift from the doorway, then lift up another forklift inside to bring the rest to the door to hand off to the other for completing the process. Since this building would be a foreground building you would not have anything very tall to reach over to access your other industries. The other advantage of a non specific random concrete area, it can easily be changed to take otehr products such as a transload facility for oil, or sand or pipe or wahtever else you want.

I am (again) leaning toward some sort of transload track and I'm pretty well covered for the car types that might spot there. Got plenty of bulkhead flats and double door box cars suitable for building products. Could have a tank car transload, covered hoppers, etc. Would use something like what you describe; simply track in a concrete pad with a chain link fence and gate and perhaps some other details, depending on what is off loaded there. There are several prototype examples close by so will have to go take a look at some of them. One facility nearby receives tank cars of grain alcohol that is delivered to the Old Grandad distillery. Here's the location I'm talking about: http://www.bing.com/maps/?v=2&cp=qbxmgn7...orm=LMLTCC don't get much simpler then that.

Now start building.....

There in lays the hard part - getting started! Just too many prototype idea floating around in the old head and that really holds me back!

*** EDIT ***
With all this planning and re-planning, one thing that I hadn't been figuring on with the layout is the fact that I can add a 6ft or 8ft staging track to the left end of the bench work. Wouldn't call it a cassette, as it would be semi-permanent, but could allow for either spacing things out a bit more or adding another track or two on the main part of the layout. This staging track would need be only 6 or 8 inches deep - just enough to have one or two tracks for train staging on it. So I may look at that too.

See what I mean about getting started?