Oregon Trunk on a HCD (N scale)

[Cody]

The fertilizer dealer is finished for now.



Michael Whiteman asked in another thread if the distributor cone at the top of the elevator leg came with holes in it for the tubes. It does not, but it was a good idea and I do have a drill...




Here we have Farmer Fred pulling his disk spreader onto the scales to be loaded.



While they primarily sell bulk fertilizer, they do sell it by the bag also. The office has a wall mount AC unit and a pipe/vent for the bathroom inside.



Awning over the door and the employee parking area:



The winch they use to pull the hoppers along the spur for unloading, and the bumper at the end of the track:



And finally, a wide angle shot of how this structure fits into the light industrial area:



I'll need to re-take that one without the patches of afternoon light coming in the window on the backdrop. Oh well. This is still missing some details on the back side, including a dump pit (which I'm not sure if I'll actually model) and a conveyor from the dump pit to the base of the elevator leg. It's hard to see back there though, so this will work for now.

[Paul S.]

That's a job well done, Cody!

[Allen]

Very nice job Cody!

[Michael Whiteman]

That turned out really well Cody. All the details and especially the bags on pallets really made it come alive. If you ever decide to do the dump pit copy mine. They all have a cover to keep stuff from blowing into them so you really don't have to dig a pit between the rails. In N scale I would cut a piece of colored paper to represent the cover seeing as it is only an inch thick in real life. If you run out of quick projects this winter, a power pole with 3 transformers would look at home there . This facility would no doubt require a lot of 3 phase power.

[Cody]

A cover over the dump pit is a great idea, thanks.

I'm pretty ignorant on electrical power to these places, and it's an aspect that I haven't really modeled on any of my buildings. I'm not sure I want to deal with power poles versus imagine under ground lines and figure out what needs to be modeled above ground.

[Paul S.]

Cody, Showcase Miniatures makes a nice three-phase downline transformer kit. Just that alone would strongly convey to the eye what Michael is suggesting. You can see it to the right in the photo of the Flanary truck dump.

https://realisticmodelrailroading.ne...7487#post27487

[Cody]

Thanks Paul, I'll check that out. Looks good in your truck dump scene.

[Michael Whiteman]

That is a neat kit Paul but I think it's a little overwhelming for a business this size, besides I feel this 3 on a pole style is more in tune with Cody's modern era layout. This is an easy scratch build in N scale. Just glue 3 round pieces of plastic on a telegraph pole after stripping off all but one crossarm. An old spue might be perfect. A couple of short pieces of wire on top the transformers painted white would represent the insulators nicely. Don't bother with the wires. You wouldn't see them anyway.

For those of you modeling in larger scales just copy the wires in the photo. The 3 cylindrical items between the transformers and the crossarm are fuses. The thin rod "blows" when there's an overload hopefully saving the transformer.

[Cody]

Thanks for the explanation Michael Whiteman. I need to decide if I want to model above ground poles (skipping the lines themselves) and maybe run them along the access road to provide power to all three businesses, or "model" that as an underground line and just have pad mounted transformers next to the buildings. Which would just be boxes with doors on them.

[Michael Whiteman]

Burried utilities are a lot more expensive and I don't know if they would do that in rural areas. It all depends on the year you're modeling I'd guess. A little online research should answer this question.

[Cody]

I've been tinkering with my canyon scene, trying to recreate some of the rocks slides and the vegetation along the river seen here without going overboard. I'm an idiot at linking pictures, but here's the url of an example I'm looking at on railpictures.net

https://www.railpictures.net/photo/733771/

And here's the progress.

[Allen]

That looks real good Cody. Using proto images can really help portray the looks of our models.
Well it looks like you got the link correct, which is how one should do it.

[Michael Whiteman]

Perfect! It would be real easy to over do this feature and loose your focus on the canyon.

[Cody]

I've been working on roads, trying to get a faded, mottled asphalt look. After a whole bunch of messing around and repainting this is as good as I can get it. The road itself is styrene, and I used a few different layers of paint daubed on with a sponge, and then some light sanding with steel wool. The darker streaks down each lane are weathering powders.

[Allen]

Oh yeah! That looks real good.

[Michael Whiteman]

Wow! What a difference. That looks great Cody.

[Cody]

Thank you guys.

[Cody]

Michael Whiteman asked about a couple of buildings in the weekly photo thread. I didn't want to derail that thread, so I'll post this here. One side effect of having the buildings removable from my layout to make it easier to move, is I can also remove them to change eras. It's also part of why I don't have any road markings (and it's a small enough industrial access road that it doesn't really need them anyway). So, my '90s era lumber loading facility is replaced with a scratch built '40s/'50s era warehouse or team track structure:



There's also room for this little feed n seed place:



And the fertilizer dealer is replaced with this older grain elevator:

[Michael Whiteman]

Nice structures. I really like the warehouse Cody.