Model Railroad Economy

[Brakie]

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

There were many 4x8 track plans back in the day where 2 or more separate industries would ship freight cars to each other instead of to an interchange, for example: a lumber mill and a furniture maker. since 4x8s rarely had any interchanges they would simply make all of the industries ship cars to each-other.

That was back in the day when we thought that was a hip idea and spent more time building models then as life got easier and we started to understand how a railroad operates we decided that wasn't a hip idea after all..I mean gee whiz without a interchange how did that Santa Fe boxcar get on our line?

Another gee whiz was those two industries are so close together a trucking line could shuttle the lumber to our furniture factory.Our eyes could no longer see these industries being "miles apart" regardless how many lap miles we made-the basic back then one lap equals one mile.

We kept the mine and power plant as a load in/empties out operation and rethought our operation goals.