Model Railroading on the Cheap

   This hobby of Model Railroading involves lots of compromises; here is how I dealt with one of mine.  The reason for this page is to apologize for locating my feed mill on the wrong side of its railroad spur track.  The front side serves trucks and is the business side of the building that everyone sees. The railroad spur track should be on the other side of the building maybe right up close and it might not have had much of a porch roof over a simple sliding door for access to a box car. (I recall that our mill had a wheel jack* for moving a car if necessary).

   I like the features of this building with the large covered docks and multiple stories but I wanted to show the more familiar front of the building in a corner of my layout. It is not my choice of colors but back in the late 1980s I was in too big a hurry to populate the layout with structures to worry about proper color probably barn-red or white.

   I wanted a picture with the boxcar on the correct side of the mill. So I lifted the mill from the layout and temporarily moved it to another location on the layout with a spur track facing the other way. I fooled the camera for these pictures by covering some mainline tracks with a brown paper sack and placed a couple trucks out front. Then for the rear side shots I turned the mill around in its original location to show the other side and get another picture.

   My layout has never had much space for rural scenes but I tried to get just a small bit of rural memories. My plastic feed mill is by Pola, W. Germany.  I think it has too many windows for a feed mill.  I have had it for so long that I can’t remember how I acquired it. I like it because it is a good representation of a rural cattle feed mill found all over the mid-west. I recall a mill near home with the large ‘porch roof’ overhanging the loading dock and maybe a dump pit for moving grain to the inside and possibly a scales platform to weigh loaded vehicles. Grain could also be handled in burlap bags.

   I wanted to show the back side of this kit which I built over 25 years ago and can’t remember how it looked. While I had things disarrayed, I took a picture of the backside which I had not seen in many years. I had forgotten that it had a small dock (with missing roof) on the rear side. I don’t care about that blemish because the mill will go back into the corner (with sky-board-wall-covering) just as soon as the cameraman leaves.

   Feed mills ground and mixed grains for people as well as animals. I recall Grandpa taking wheat and oats to be sold to the mill and home grown buck wheat to be ground into flour for homemade pancakes with maple syrup in about 1950.

* A wheel jack was a long heavy wood pole with a movable steel wedge on the end to force between a RR car wheel and the rail so a man could move the car by hand.