Built in 1908, the Live Oak Creamery was the first butter factory in the Gilroy area, at the center of Santa Clara county’s dairy industry in the early 20th Century. Before this, farmer had to ship their products to other areas to be turned into butter.
This is a great small industry that offers plenty of opportunity to customize it for a unique location on your railroad.
If you are modeling a turn-of-the-century railroad, our free plans of the Smith-Sherlock store in South Pass, Wyoming are the starting point of a perfect structure for the commercial district. It exudes that old-west charm with its log construction on three sides and frame construction on the false-front facade. Even if the period of your model railroad layout is later, the store would be great as an abandoned building harkening back to an earlier era, or a museum (the use for which the real building is currently tasked).
To maintain a hobbyist’s interest, a model railroad layout must be about more than watching a toy train chasing its tail around an oval of track. Prototype railroads exist for a purpose: to move freight and passengers from one point to another. A model railroad designed to simulate the same purpose will be much more interesting, and more likely to remain an active part of a hobbyist’s leisure time activities. To simulate the movement of freight, a model railroad must have freight producers and freight consumers; in other words: Industry. But how do you decide what industry to model on your layout? Grain elevators can fit in just about any model railroad theme. Anywhere there is a flat patch of land, farmers will try to grow crops on it. And every region of the country is in need of a constant source of grain to feed its citizens. And when it comes to grain elevators, Armour’s Warehouse in Seneca, Illinois, the largest and oldest of the remaining grain elevators on the Illinois and Michigan Canal, provides an unmistakable silhouette. Grain elevators such as this one served as an “intermediary industry” between producers and consumers. They were storage facilities for grain brought by local farmers for shipment to large “terminal” elevators in major cities, which shipped to bakeries or packagers for smaller wholesale or retail quantities. Our Armour’s Warehouse Free Plans page offers high-resolution downloadable plans that can be printed out to any scale, giving the model railroader everything he needs for a scratch-building project that will make his or her model railroad layout stand out from the crowd.
Located at East Broad Top Railroad mile marker 24.3, one-half mile east of Coles Valley Road, near the town of Saltillo in Huntingdon County, the Coles Station, Pennsylvania, water tank is the last surviving enclosed water station along the coal-hauling narrow gauge railroad’s right-of-way. Enclosing the water tank made it possible to keep the water from freezing during Pennsylvania’s harsh winter months with nothing more than the heat of a small coal-fired stove.
We have free downloadable plans of the this historic Cole’s Station enclosed water tank that would be a perfect trackside structure to scratch-build for a steam-era model railroad layout, or even as an abandoned structure on a more modern era model railroad layout.