Authentic industries

How to pick industries? You can just browse through the hobby store or Web site, picking up pre-made ones like Walthers' Red Wing Milling, Interstate Fuel and Oil and Mew River Coal, etc. etc. There are a lot of great ones out there, if you're willing to settle for off-the-rack.

But what if you really want something authentic and realistic, that reflects modern day rail traffic (some of which can seem sort of mysterious with all these unmarked cars and chemical names)?

I had a really good time doing this. After closely examining my prototype route, I called up the Chattanooga GIS site and started researching the industries that looked interesting and small enough to model with some degree of realism.

Most GIS mapping systems (check out the one for your city or county) have features that let you click on a property and pull up the tax info. This will usually give you a name, sometimes rather cryptic, but enough for a Web search.

One industry I'll be modeling is Ergon Terminaling. A search of this name pulled up a slick, Flash-produced site with a full description of what the company does and where and how, and from this it was easy to extrapolate the kind of rail traffic it would produce. There was even a great aerial shot of the Chattanooga terminal, although I see the site has changed in the few weeks since I looked. Look at the site here.

The following image is from the Chattanooga GIS site, and shows part of the CTC that will be generating freight traffic on my layout. The area is in actuality known as Moccasin Bend:



Signal Mountain Cement is highlighted at the top, at one of the extreme ends of the line, and highlighted at the bottom is the area along the river where Ergon Terminaling and a barge-loading facility for Commercial Metals (a scrap recyler) are located. Clicking on these parcels on the GIS site brought up the ownership information and kicked off the research.

Now here's a close-up of the Ergon/Commercial Metals areas:



Note the branchline proper, over on the right hugging the hillside. My Ergon and Commercial Metals will be much abbreviated, of course, but you can see how incredibly useful this information is when building models. Just to the south of this area is the little GEO Specialty Chemicals plant, which produces aluminum sulfate for the nearby Moccasin Bend wastewater treatment plant. I'll be modeling this as well.

Next post will be about the industries I have chosen to model.