MidWest Plastics Update

Made myself busy this week with some work on the MidWest Plastics plant that's located along my GTW line. This plant takes in loads of plastic pellets as raw material, and ships out boxcar loads of finished product.

I've been planning to making some more changes/improvements to this industry for some time, and I've given quite a bit of thought to the way I want it to look if I ever manage get it finished up.

Here's the way things looked at MidWest Plastics this back in March.

And then in October I had the industry over on the workbench, while I changed the spur entrance from the right-hand end to the left.  At that time I mounted the whole thing onto a piece of 1/4" MDF, ballasted the track, and added some scenery.

I figured that a plant such as this would and should have a fence around it to at least discourage any ne'er-do-wells from causing trouble, so I made up a chain link fence to run the full 49 inch length of the MidWest property.

So, it was back over to the workbench this week for the whole industry to get the fence installed. I attached "No Trespassing" signs to the fence, and also painted the rails with "rail brown" using my airbrush.  That made a big improvement in the appearance of the MidWest spur.  I do still have to make a gate for the rail entrance, but here's a view looking down the spur

The rail joiners in this photo above can be slid back (toward the camera) enabling me to lift out the entire industry assembly and take it over to the workbench to work on it. More on that another time.

I had blanked out the lower windows of the brick building with siding previously, but I thought that I would rather see them as having been bricked in with concrete blocks. It was a simple matter to cut some block patterned plastic sheet to size, and press-fit them into the window areas. I put the concrete block into just two of the windows, and blanked out some of the individual panes on the other two. I also put the concrete block in the upper window on the end of the building as well.  The steel siding is moved to the top row of windows.

The primer coloured steel frameworks that I've scratch-built are intended to carry piping up and over the rail cars to the building.  The three silos are slated for replacement soon.  I've just this week purchased a new Pellet Transfer kit from Walthers, so that MidWest Plastics can have the railings, ladders, and piping details added.

That'll be all for this week, except to wish a Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all.