04-06-2013, 11:15 AM
MountainMan Wrote:OTH, any modern layout is just a big box with doors and the same kind of cars lined up in a row. What would you call a coal mining operation? Auto transporters? Lumber cars? Scrap metal depots? Modern railroads are all about unit trains of identical cars filled with identical products.
If this were my layout, I would go back a few years to boxcar advertising logos and have many different brands of beer cars lined up waiting to be filled with their brand and sent out to those millions of happy Americans. It could even be a bit of a switching puzzle, if Bud is always at Door #3, and Blatz is at Door # 5, and so forth. Have to get the right cars in the right spots to receive the right brand of beer.
This was kind of what I was thinking. I'm a big fan of Lance's work and enjoy industries that are operationally interesting as much as visually interesting. The thing that really intrigued me was having two-wide car unloading, which I really haven't seen elsewhere.
One other thing that struck me about this place was that the cars weren't all identical. Boxcars, yes, but it was a very colorful assortment from modern hi-cubes, to 60' beer cars, to patched rust buckets.