"Fred,
You're
welcome!
I hesitated
to do that math (4940 cars per year, divided by 365 days per year = 13.5 cars
per day). I don’t know if finished lumber is shipped seasonally or if it
is shipped uniformly throughout the year. I'm willing to bet that others
(Greg Martin) know the answer.
I suppose it
doesn't matter much. The number of cars is far less than a prototype
train. So one can model it as a single block of lumber cars per day, or
perhaps a couple of smaller blocks. Obviously, the number of cars in a
“block” on most model RR’s is far fewer than on the
prototype.
Regards,
-Jeff"
Fred, Jeff and
all,
Lumber was
bought, sold and shipped every day to some degree. It was a
commodity market product and being so the price was either up or down everyday
just as you would expect of any commodity. As you would expect
there were certain times of the year that the market would go up due to
supply/demand issues.
Here is what trends I can
recall and I believe are still common today, the buyers would come to play in
late February considering the transit time the material would arrive in early
March and to the jobsite by months end. The market would climb through the
last week in April and first week of May. June was a month of tapering, Fourth
of July "shut-downs" would help hold the market up and August and September
were down months. Somewhere about the 10th of October the market would get a
kick start again and if the market took "baby steps" it could hold through
Thanksgiving week "shut-downs" then the mills would have a good Christmas.
There were always some market runs for various fabricated reasons, so lumber
was always moving.
So I guess if you are
modeling the spring months you would see the largest groups of cars headed
south to Californian and also east towards Chicago.
Remember eighty percent of all
commodities in a common house are plate stock, studs and roof sheathing. So
think surfaced dimensional 2"x 4" with a dab of 2"x 6" (plumbing walls) 2"x 4"
P.E.T. studs, and 1"x 6" (or wider) solid or skip sheathing. The balance
was surfaced floor joists, rafters, and header material as well as floor
sheathing. Heavy un-dress timber was a small commodity where as 4"x and 6"x
dressed timber was common for headers for the walls and timbers for the
floors.
Greg Martin
Eventually all things
merge into one and a river runs through it.
Norman
Maclean
