I'm part of a club that is in the midst of designing 2 new layouts. We want these layouts to be operations based. We want to know the particular types of freight cars that would be used to service some of the industries that we want on the layout. For most of these industries, some cars types are rather obvious. We're also interested in knowing if there were any "specialty" freight cars that were unique to the industry. The general time frame for our layouts is the 1950's. Finally, when did the grain industry start using covered hoppers?
The list of industries is:
Brewery Grain industry Bridge & Iron works Paper & timber industry
There are two other types of industries which were widespread if not universal in the eras of the 1950's and before: - the team track and LCL merchandise. In terms of space on a model railroad, team tracks are relatively cheap. Meanwhile, LCL can be anything between just a peddler car on the local freight to massive car transfers which occupied acres. Most industries received spare parts, small machinery, etc. via LCL, and many shipped finished goods in lots which were smaller than carload. Indeed, most industries portrayed on model railroads are not large enough to support carload shipments to diverse destinations, and, thus, were forced to use LCL.
