CSX has a nice little industrial spur off its Richmond to Newport News, VA mainline - which sees 90% coal traffic plus a couple AMTRAK trains. Great mix of industries: Nabisco plant, plastics plant, a couple building supply locations, 2 or 3 logistics warehouses for spot dependent switching locations, and an interesting - read prototypically problematic - small run around to serve the entire area.
Trying to draw up an L shaped shelf trackplan based on this. Why stop at only 1 layout under construction?
Here's some links to the Google Earth overview.
[ Guests cannot view attachments ]
Here is the double main, running west to east across the shot, with the Nabisco plant south of the mains. Two tracks go into the facility. Looks like 2 clean out tracks. Receives air slides of flour, boxcars for outbound shipments of Twinkies and Oreos, probably a corn sweetener car too, but not sure. Makes for a good background structure as only the very top of the large building is rail related.
The north side spur curves through a pair of small ponds - marshy but more open water than grass. Good for a scenic highlight. Tracks are on an embankment with one culvert in mid curve. This spur leads to the industrial area in the last two photos. The mains would likely be on the short leg of the layout, as the main action is in the industrial area off screen above this photo.
[ Guests cannot view attachments ]
A few hundred yards east are 3 more rail served industries. The curved spur has plastic inlet piping along it and receives long strings of plastic pellet hoppers for the tanks on the top right corner of the left most large building. Lots of trees around it screen most angles from street views though. They make all kinds of plastic bags here, including the produce bags and plastic shopping bags found at your local grocery store.
Red River Foods in the center seems to get a mix of boxcars and an occasional reefer. San J International is a Japanese food importer, but no longer receives rail shipments. They make lots of soy sauce here. At the bottom of the SanJ spur is a Kempsville Building Materials warehouse. Including it in a prototypical spot will not be possible and with 2 others in the area, 3 is a crowd. The highway overpass makes a convienent way to hide tracks running off the layout edge or into a cassette for staging.
[ Guests cannot view attachments ]
Here's the switching area north of the ponds. I rotated the image 90 degrees to get a better fit in the screen capture. This area is L shaped, but could be straightened on a layout I think without changing operations. I always hesitate to do that though, as it disorients anyone familiar with the area and expecting the layout to faithfully resemble the cardinal directions on the prototype. Thoughts?
The unlabeled warehouse on the left is Riverside Logistics, which has a spur going inside the building on the right edge of the white roofed portion. Again, the building is screened from the tracks by a row of trees. Center left is a WestRock paper warehouse. A spur comes off a short run around that holds at most 6 prototype cars. There is no run around capacity on the mainline, as the spur is accessed only by a single crossover between the mainline and passing siding just north of Nabisco. WestRock receives a mix of 50 and 60 foot hi cube paper hauling boxcars. The track runs out of view to the left and curves to reach more industries.
[ Guests cannot view attachments ]
After a 70-75 degree curve, the tracks run through a number of non rail served buildings, several with abandoned tracks still in place. Several remains of turnouts are present, with the leg leading to the abandoned track pulled up. Some places have just ties and ballast left while others still have rails rusting in place. Center bottom is a small building supply dealer with a spur that holds 1 spot for a centerbeam spot with covered unloading area. A second larger building supply location is at the end of the tracks, where there is also a rather complicated set of partially cannibalized turnouts that now allow only the use of the spur next to the concrete ramp.
Norfolk Southern has tracks just a short distance to the north of this area, also near the Richmond, VA airport. Those serve a Coca Cola bottling plant that receives heavy corn syrup tank car traffic. I might swap out the last building supply spot for the bottling plant to increase the operational variety. Or I might now. This area also used to have a propane dealership - off a second spur further east that ran alongside several other concrete and metal industrial buildings. There are more non rail served industries than active spots there, including a puppy day care building that would be a mood setting structure for sure if included by the tracks somehow.
Cramming this all into a 13 x 5 foor L shaped layout will be a challenge. Letting it ramble into a 15x 19 foot area is probably too much space for the return. The whole area was the subject of a clinic at the last Mid-Atlantic RMP meet in Baltimore, that I unfortunately missed.
Speculation, suggestions, and good natured harassment welcome in this thread. As the song says, "what to leave in, what to leave out."
