The Model Railroaders Guide to Industries Along the Track 2

by Jeff Wilson

Add realism to your layout! Jeff Wilson provides insights, photos, and guidelines for modeling several rail-served industries. Includes overviews of creameries and milk traffic; the paper industry; breweries; iron ore mining and transloading; freight houses and less-than-carload traffic, and coal customers.

88 pages, Paperback

First published November 28, 2006

About the author

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Reviews

[Steven · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an informative reference book by Jeff Wilson on how the various trackside industries of the past used to operate in conjunction with railroads. The goal of the book is to provide context for the modeler, so that if you want to, say, model the Railway Express Agency's baggage service in the 1950s, you can do so more accurately. As with the other books in this series, there is a ton of "real world" reference material here, which is very helpful to the modeler. But also like the other installments, there are very few really useful suggestions about how one could convert the pictures and information on real-world industries to scale models on the layout. In fairness, Wilson provides a couple of these, but he really should provide one in every chapter (i.e., one per industry) and he does not. If you're like me, and having trouble picturing exactly how to model these industries, the book isn't much help.

One of the changes Wilson made after the first book was to incorporate modeling and brand information for the various scales into each chapter in a few paragraphs of text. I don't like this approach. In the first book, he had a chart in the back, with a section for each chapter, and a table showing he scale, manufacturer, and part number. The chart is a much easier way to look up what models are available (or were, at the time of printing), than trying to dig through a paragraph of text to find it. Also, Wilson provides part numbers and descriptions mostly for HO, with a little bit of N. In the first book he provided some O reference material, but not in this one. If you're trying to find O-scale products to make one of these industries come alive on your O-scale layout, this book won't help you find them. Now, to be fair to Wilson, the two most commonly modeled scales are HO and N, so he is just following the numbers. But it would be nice if he provided a little help for the O-scalers (note: I am not one, but I still think they should have some suggestions here).

Overall this was a good reference book about the industries, but isn't really a very big help when it comes to actually modeling the operations.