Model Railroad Economy

[steinjr]

I was doodling layout plans this week and put together decidedly retro model railroad concept - the self-contained home layout. You remember them from the magazines up through the 1970s, layouts where every industry had another paired with it for traffic routing and where interchanges were a foreign concept. I started listing industry pairs that could play off each other and here's what I came up with:

Bakery
In: Flour, Boxes
Box Factory
In: Pulpwood, Coal
Out: Boxes
Brewery
In: Coal, Grain
Out: Beer
Concrete Plant
In: Stone
Coal Tipple
Out: Coal
Creamery
Out: Milks, Butter
Flour Mill
In: Grain
Out: Flour
Furniture Factory
In: Lumber, Boxes
Out: Furniture
Grain Elevator
Out: Grain
Lumber Yard
In: Lumber, Coal
Quarry
Out: Stone
Sawmill
Out: Lumber, Pulpwood
Warehouse
In: Lumber, Furniture, Flour, Milks, Butter

I've tried to keep industries to a manageable model size. A steel mill could supply an auto plant that ships finished cars, but both of those are generally HUGE facilities that would overwhelm a home layout. Anything else to add to a retro-styled model railroad economy?

Leaving aside the question of whether it is smart to have paired industries, or whether it would have created more interesting traffic to have traffic sources and destinations off layout, I am not sure I see your actual pairs in the list above? To me it looks more like just a list of industries with some inbound and some outbound loads?

The classic paired industries on a model railroad layout is where cars would be running back and forth between the two industries - like a coal mine and a powerplant, or a mine and an ore processing plant - where you typically would try to place em back to back with a backdrop in between, so you pull loads from the mine, and pushes in empties, and then run around to the opposite side of the backdropand pull empties from the power plant, before pushing in the loads. Repeat as many times as desired.

You could of course also model e.g. a chemical plant of some kind somewhere on the layout and a barge terminal elsewhere. The barge terminal then functions more or less as a team track - it is a general source and destination for tank cars, which you cannot tell whether are empty or loaded.

Lots of options here.

Smile,
Stein