Industries in Maine

[Guilford System]

I'm trying to decide what industries I can have on my layout which is based in Maine.

My time frame is from the 1970s to the 1990s & I'm planning my layout so I can run a whole host of Maine railroads. I'm starting with the Guilford System & the Bangor & Aroostook but I plan on adding the Boston & Maine & Maine Central to the collection. Im planning on 3 or 4 locos from each railroad so I get plenty of choice to run on my compact railroad which is 2 x 6'6

I'm planning on building the docksider bonus layout in lance Mindheim's " 8 realistic trackplans for a spare room " but moving its location to deepest Maine. The problem I face is knowing next to nothing about the railroads in Maine & the industries along the lines. The layout has 3 industries on it & I want to give the small layout plenty of switching operation.
I've looked on YouTube to try & find some videos of the railroads in question switching but I have not found much.

Can anyone please help me out as it is hard to find details on a railroad that is in another country. Also it would be great if I could tie in the industries with kits that are available to purchase. My gauge is HO.

Thanks

Si

[Mike Kieran]

There were a variety of industries in Maine that could set a layout anywhere in New England. I have 4 industries that come to mind if I were to build that layout. I would have a food processing plant, a manufacturing company, a building supply, and an LPG distributor. This would handle traffic of 3-6 cars a day. A team track could also be used as an everything goes there industry.

The food processor would have the following traffic:
Inbound:
tank cars (vegetable oil, corn syrup, preservatives)
refrigerated cars (produce, meat)
covered hoppers (sugar, salt, preservatives)
box cars (packaging)
Outbound:
RBL box cars (food)

The manufacturing company would have the following traffic:
Inbound:
coil cars (sheet metal)
box cars (hardware, tools, parts)
flat cars (machinery, wire spools, piping)
gondolas (wire spools, piping)
tank cars (lubricant, glue, sealant, paint)
plastic pellet covered hoppers (plastic pellets)
Outbound:
box cars (manufactured products)
gondolas (scrap)

The building supply would have the following traffic:
Inbound:
covered hoppers (sand, cement)
hoppers (gravel, wood chips, oyster & clam shells)
flat cars & box cars (various building products)

The LPG distributor would have the following traffic:
Inbound:
LPG tank cars

[jwb]

Guilford's traffic is largely paper products, input and output. The input includes kaolin clay and marble slurry for making glossy paper, in tank cars and covered hoppers. Locally, pulpwood cars are used for hauling pulpwood to the mills. The paper output goes in boxcars. Pretty much every train you see on Guilford will have these cars predominating. Other traffic includes inbound grain for cattle feed, inbound propane and other petroleum, inblund utility poles, and inbound cement. The later you get in your period, the more this traffic will predominate.

[Guilford System]

Thank you so far guys for the input & help regarding the industries

Would these businesses be the same for the Bangor & Aroostook railroad & the Boston & Maine ??

Si

[jwb]

By the Guilford period, early 1980s to 2005 or so, the B&M wasn't much more than a bridge route from the Albany, NY area to Portland, ME. The later you get in this period, the more you have trains running from points on the MEC, like Northern Maine Jct and Waterville, through to East Deerfield or Mechanicville. Massachusetts traffic, including Boston, was more or less left to the Boston & Albany/Conrail/CSX. The Bangor & Aroostook is somewhat similar, hauling a lot of pulpwood and wood chips to paper mills and inbound petroleum and propane, with outbound paper products in boxcars. Its perishable traffic had almost completely dried up by this time period. The Boston & Maine before the 1980s also had paper traffic from Berlin, NH with inbound woodchips from points on line and outbound paper in older style 50-foot (1970s) and 40-foot (1960s and earlier) boxcars. It also had bridge traffic down the Connecticut River line from Canada to the New York area from CP and CN/CV. This was pretty much gone by Guilford.

[jwb]

If you're interested in Guilford, there are lots of railfan DVDs available, which I think would be a good next step in thinking about how to model it. One source, but by no means the only one, is Big E Productions, where you can find a number of Guilford related DVDs <!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://trainvideos.com/allProducts?filter0%5B%5D=30&filter1%5B%5D=4">http://trainvideos.com/allProducts?filt ... r1%5B%5D=4</a><!-- m -->

[tomustang]

Si, their are some basic websites that take care of some of the info you need

From wiki:

Maine's agricultural outputs include poultry, eggs, dairy products, cattle, wild blueberries, apples, maple syrup and maple sugar. Aroostook County is known for its potato crops. Commercial fishing, once a mainstay of the state's economy, maintains a presence, particularly lobstering and groundfishing. Western Maine aquifers and springs are a major source of bottled water.

Maine's industrial outputs consist chiefly of paper, lumber and wood products, electronic equipment, leather products, food products, textiles, and bio-technology. Naval shipbuilding and construction remain key as well, with Bath Iron Works in Bath and Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Kittery. Naval Air Station Brunswick is also in Maine, and formerly served as a large support base for the U.S. Navy. However, the BRAC campaign initiated Brunswick's closing, despite a government-funded effort to upgrade its facilities.

Maine is the number one exporter of blueberries. The largest toothpick manufacturing plant in the United States used to be located in Strong, Maine. The Strong Wood Products plant produced 20 million toothpicks a day. It closed in May, 2003.

Tourism and outdoor recreation play a major and increasingly important role in Maine's economy. The state is a popular destination for sport hunting (particularly deer, moose and bear), sport fishing, snowmobiling, skiing, boating, camping and hiking, among other activities.

Maine ports play a key role in national transportation. Beginning around 1880, Portland's rail link and ice-free port made it Canada's principal winter port, until the aggressive development of Halifax, Nova Scotia, in the mid-1900s. In 2001, Maine's largest city of Portland surpassed Boston as New England's busiest port (by tonnage), due to its ability to handle large tankers. Maine's Portland International Jetport was recently expanded, providing the state with increased air traffic from carriers such as JetBlue and Southwest Airlines.

Maine has very few large companies that maintain headquarters in the state, and fewer than before due to consolidations and mergers, particularly in the pulp and paper industry. Some of the larger companies that do maintain headquarters in Maine include Fairchild Semiconductor in South Portland; IDEXX Laboratories, in Westbrook; Hannaford Bros. Co. in Scarborough, Unum in Portland; TD Bank, in Portland; L.L. Bean in Freeport; Cole Haan and DeLorme, both located in Yarmouth. Maine is also the home of The Jackson Laboratory, the world's largest non-profit mammalian genetic research facility and the world's largest supplier of genetically purebred mice.

As for specifics of towns and what's rolling through:
<!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://www.rrpicturearchives.net/locationList.aspx?Level=3&ID=ME,US">http://www.rrpicturearchives.net/locati ... 3&ID=ME,US</a><!-- m -->

You can also acess the main page and look for either railroad to give you more ideas on what you want to use

[Mike Kieran]

Let's remember that he has a small ISL to work with, so unit trains and heavy industries are out of the question. He can only handle 3-6 cars on this layout design.



If he added a yard onto one end, he could have this layout designed by Expert Trackplanner Extraordinaire Paulus Jas:

[jwb]

It might be worth pointing out, then, that Guilford is an example of modern rail economics, trying to maximize line haul without the expenses of switching and intermediate yards. The typical railfan experience with Guilford is watching a through train go by anywhere between eastern Maine and western Massachusetts, or watching switching at East Deerfield, which is a large yard. If you wanted to stay with Guilford, you'd want to focus either on the remaining branch lines in Maine, the stub line to Manchester, NH, or what's left of the Connecticut River line. Other options if you wanted to stay with a New England prototype might be the Providence and Worcester or the New England Central, which have slower-paced operations with a little more local activity, or refocus your interest on earlier time periods, where there were many more branch lines and small yards.

[Mike Kieran]

That's why I mentioned the industries that I did. You can have these industries anywhere and either have a local switcher do the job or a short line (New England was/is chocked full of them) do the job. The Moshassuck Valley Railroad and the Warwick Railway were taken over by the Providence and Worcester Railroad, but operated as separate entities for awhile.

If you want a nice little layout that fits on a 6x1 foot foot space, then you may want to look at Rich Weyland's Highland Terminal Railroad (in my opinion, one of the best switching layouts ever designed on a small footprint) http://carendt.us/articles/highland/. Here's the basic plan:



If you type in small layouts or 6x1 foot ho train layouts in your favorite search engine, then click on images on the results page. That way you can see track plans before you click on the link for the full story of the layout.

As far as industries are concerned, industrial parks have a vast array of customers and freight car flow. The listing that I put down earlier is for a good mix of freight cars with 3-6 cars handled per day.

[steinjr]

Our new friend has already picked a track plan from one of Lance Mindheim's books - the "docksider" plan.

It is atypical for a Mindheim plan - central runaround, two spurs off the one end - one off the main, one off the runaround, and a crossed pair of spurs off the center and other end of the runaround. Looks roughly like this, if memory serves me right - or maybe the runaround is on the other side of the main and the three top spurs come off the runaround - something like that.



Personally I would perhaps have looked for a fork plan for a layout as short as 6' 6", instead of a runaround with short leads. Say something simple like this:

or




But one big question is whether the 6' 6" is all the place available, or whether that is the space for a permanent layout, and there is room for a removable lead or a removable section on one or both sides. If there is room for a removable lead, that leaves a lot more space for a long industry spur with one or more industries on.

Then he could e.g. have a look at Mike Confalone's magnificent 6x3 foot scene "St Regis Paper Mill" from his Allagash layout - with the first part presented in Model Railroad Hobbyist no 4 / 2012 (http://issuu.com/mr-hobbyist/docs/mrh12-...mode=embed)

There are many possible ways to go here. It might be worthwhile to explore the modeling goal and givens before deciding on a track plan and trying to put industry names to the spurs in Lance's docksider plan.

Smile,
Stein

Edit: fixed a couple of typos, added a rough sketch or the Mindheim plan from memory, and removed a claim that the spurs in the Mindheim plan were so short.

[steinjr]

here is e.g a quick and dirty way of looking at industries and track plans.

I googled for "Bangor and Aroostook", read the wikipedia article, saw that they had served paper industries in Millinocket, East Millinocket and Madawaska, ME. Used http://www.bing.com/maps to zoom in on these places and look for train tracks.

The Millinocket facility had lots of switchbacks - not smart for a small layout, dropped.
The Madawaska facility looked more promising: http://binged.it/QQmBfd

Taking inspiration from, but not trying to do an exact representation, I hacked up this possible track plan:



Okay - if we can use a removable switching lead of 2 feet or 30", then there is room to build a relatively large paper mill - with inbound and outbound loads of various kinds - taking a list of paper industry chemicals from the opsig website: http://www.opsig.org/reso/inddb/PaperChemicals.txt

For instance. Just an example - not an attempt to steer you in a specific direction. And it is not a given that you will have room for a detachable switching lead.

Smile,
Stein

[Mike Kieran]

If I was to pick any of the plans to fit your area, I would go with Stein's first two plans. The thing that bothers me about Lance Mindheim's plans is that he usually requires a drop leaf or removable cassette. It doesn't mean that I don't like his ideas, I just see a layout like the Palmetto Spur as 80 inches plus a cassette, I see it as 114 inches or 9.5 feet long. The Docksider Plan doesn't have long enough switching leads. You need at least 30 inches for the drill track aka the switching leads (although the Highland Terminal has alot of nice features.

[Brakie]

Stein,I like the 2nd and 3rd plan since and IMHO the first one looks to much like a switching puzzle.
-------------------------------------------
Mike,I always did like the Highland Terminal plan and always thought a 0-6-0T and 40' cars would look good but,for more modern times with 50' -60' cars a GE 44 or 70 would work..

Of course one shouldn't "walbash" that layout with cars like we see in the drawing.

[Mike Kieran]

Well I wouldn't put 10 cars on it. even with 40 foot cars, I think that it's a bit much. I would go with a maximum of 6 cars on the layout. even with 50 foot cars.