Due to space considerations, most of my modeling efforts when it comes to Farmrail have focused on carload switching of oilfield-related commodities. Grain elevators and cuts of shuttle hoppers eat up space quick in HO scale. Furthermore, most of the trips I’ve made out to Farmrail to railfan focused on chasing those oilfield and rock trains. In almost a decade of following the line, I’d rarely seen wheat moving over the railroad.
All of that changed last spring, when I made the trip from North Carolina to Oklahoma for a few days. The railroad was gearing up for a big harvest, something that hadn’t happened in western Oklahoma for some years. Thanks to a heads up from a friend, I was able to chase a Farmrail grain train from Lone Wolf, OK to Clinton, OK. The loads were headed from the elevator in Lone Wolf ultimately to bigger “shuttle loader” elevators in Enid. Finally, I was chasing a train full of hard red winter wheat across the rolling hills on the former Kansas City, Mexico & Orient/Santa Fe line.
This was one of the most fun railfanning experiences I’ve had. While this sort of railroading doesn’t translate well for a space-starved modeler, its something that I’d like to find a way to model in some form. This is also the sort of scenery I enjoy. From adding join bars to weathering track, to getting weeds and shrubs just right, this is the kind of modeling that gets me going.
I love Joe Atkinson’s work on his new Iowa Interstate 4th Subdivision layout, and its focus on grain elevator operations and beautiful Iowa scenery. Unfortunately, I won’t have even that sort of modest space anytime soon. But I’ve been considering other venues to get my grain elevator fix.
As time has become more precious, I’ve found that often a 15 min operating session is more than enough. What’s equally important is that the layout essentially function as a piece of art in the home. I’ve been mulling over a cameo-style layout that portrayed a slice of a small town, with a run-around in the foreground and a grain elevator and accompanying fertilizer infrastructure along a spur.
I’ve found James Hilton‘s work on cameo layouts and Jack Hill’s HO scale layout to be very inspiring in this regard. And of course Lance Mindheim’s LAJ sets the standard for a layout functioning as art in a room.
While there probably wouldn’t be space to properly model the 5-10 car cuts of grain that Farmrail often pulls from these smaller elevators, the augers and tanks that co-ops often maintain to unload different fertilizers would provide a more modest switching opportunity, and the grain elevator itself and a cut of stored shuttle hoppers awaiting harvest could serve a mere aesthetic function.
While maybe one day I’ll have the space for something like Joe’s Iowa Interstate, I think a simple cameo could help me recreate scenes like this and the fun of that chase along the old Orient in the spring of 2024.
Red Dirt and Rails 
Thanks very much for your encouragement Alex. That means a lot to me.
Regarding your desire to model grain elevators, I love your idea of representing the fertilizer augers and tanks. I wonder if you could keep going though and maybe model a short segment of the spur serving the elevator itself as well. Even if it’s only enough to hold a car or two, creating a scene like the one in your pic above of 317 working at Sentinel could both give you a portion of an elevator track to switch, with space for a fertz auger, AND give you a scene you could extend later when more space became available.
For elevators that are further down the spur than what you can represent on your layout at the moment, maybe you could have the spur disappear into trees in this initial iteration, much as it does in that 317 pic, but then temporarily place a loading auger closer to the main to act as your spotting point for grain loading. That’s very much like what the tiny elevator at Wiota Iowa did on my prototype, loading directly from trucks into covered hoppers.
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