Adding detail to grain elevators

I have done a few details to my elevators.

Looks great, Keith.  I never get tired of looking at grain elevators.

Art

No two grain elevators are the same.

some long..

Hutchinson, Kansas

some with tall head houses and not all the silos connected to each other.

I can not find my picture of a very short elevator in Dodge City Kansas, it is approx 50 foot high.

After looking at over 50 elevators in Kansas, Texas and Oklahoma panhandes, I built my layout elevators like I wanted them to look like. You can build them any way you want too, all are different.  Tall, Short, long or wide.

Great thread !!!

Thanks to all posters !!!

CB&Q Bill

@Chugman posted:

I love grain elevators!  Every Midwest town of any size had at least one and some areas had enormous ones.  When we lived in Wichita, KS I was struck by the size of them, especially in the nearby town of Hutchinson, KS.  I decided I had to have both the traditional sized ones in my small towns and the large, concrete silo ones somewhere on my layout.  So, I made one out of 3 1/2" PVC pipes and was happy with the overall look of it.  i made a mental note that when I had the time, I had to add a lot of detailing to it.

The last time that Alanrail was over to check our progress on the layout, he was kidding me about having a number of stairways on my layout that didn't have railings.  The discussion progressed to other areas that were missing detailing.  My son Jim asked when I was going to detail my grain elevator complex?  As with so many things on a layout, that is something I definitely wanted to do.  Alan showed interest as he is extremely good at designing and producing complex and accurate detailing of all types.

We left it that I would send him some pictures of what I had in mind and he would take it from there.  The first two pictures show the area of the grain elevators I want to start with.  This is my version of the type of massive grain elevators I was so impressed with when I lived in Wichita, KS.

When I was modeling in HO, I took pictures of the grain elevators in my wife's home town of Ruthven, IA.  They are no where as large as the Kansas versions, but the basics should be similar.  I found the pictures and forwarded some of them to Alan.

As you can see from the previous posts, Alan has done an amazing job of designing the grain chutes as per these pictures.  We have been working together to tweak the measurements so they will properly fit my model.  He needed to know the OD of the silos and how far out can they project out to be aligned properly over the covered hoppers?

So I sent him these pictures.

Alan is real pleasure to work with!

Art

Hutchinson, Kansas has some of the largest undergroung salt mines in the US. That is one of thge reasons for those huge complexes.

Dick

A lot of the elevator complexes in northwest Iowa are slip-formed. There are forms inside and outside perhaps a foot thick. Cement is poured into the forms and are jacked up using hydraulic jacks. 1" every 5 to 10 minutes, 24 hours a day until it's done. I worked on a few during the summers away from college.

@CBQer posted:

A lot of the elevator complexes in northwest Iowa are slip-formed. There are forms inside and outside perhaps a foot thick. Cement is poured into the forms and are jacked up using hydraulic jacks. 1" every 5 to 10 minutes, 24 hours a day until it's done. I worked on a few during the summers away from college.

That's interesting.  I saw some elevators being constructed, but didn't pay close enough attention at the time to exactly how they were done.

Grain elevators are such an integral part of the scenery in the Midwest and a railroad is always along side them.  The old wood grain elevators are slowly dying out and being either shut down or replaced by modern poured concrete ones.

Art