Smaller Businesses along the KLR

When I started to design the KLR, the two primary considerations were size of the layout and what industries were key that I wanted to capture.  Keeping with the northern Ontario theme, the primary consideration was having enough business centered around the forest products industries that were common to the area.  And by area, I meant quite a large area, since the modeled area was essentially starting at the northern portion of southern Ontario and extending northward.  For those who have not visited Ontario, it is quite a large province, geographically speaking , comprising slightly over 10 percent of Canada's land mass.  And while the population is generally centered around the southern portion of the province, I wanted to capture the look and feel of the province along the Ottawa River Valley and northward.

Courtesy of www.trailcanada.com

My objective for the KLR was to create an impression of  an active short line that runs between 4 to 6 trains per day, excluding passenger operations.  Occasional run through traffic coming from the ONR provides additional train operations.  While the focus of my railroad changed as I was building it from a run-through operation to more of a switching operation, certain elements were kept the same.  I have a number of businesses along the KLR that can accept 1-3 carloads.  These include (in no particular order):

Quaker Oats Company of Canada Limited - The Quaker Oats plant in Peterborough produces cases of cereal and cake mixes at their facility.  Raw materials, including various grains, oils, are transported to the facility by rail.  It is quite common to see the yard filled with colorful grain hoppers of different sizes.  Finished goods are transported by boxcar or truck.

United Canadian Malt is Canada's largest manufacturer of a wide variety of liquid and dry, diastatic and non-diastatic extracts of malted barley, wheat, oats and rice.  This plant was modeled after the plant located in Peterborough, Ontario.  The plant was served by a spur to accommodate boxcars and hoppers.

Pembroke is the home of several forest products businesses, including Commonwealth Plywood, MacMillan Bathurst Inc (corrugated containers), and Temple Inland (Medium Density Fibreboard).  While not all of these industries are modeled due to space limitations, the KLR does service the Commonwealth Plywood facility.

A Beaver Lumber yard and hardware center is also present in the town of Pembroke.  I think that the old style Thrall all-door box cars were a really interesting design of rolling stock, so I took some modeling license and incorporated a business which could readily use this type of car to transport finished goods. 

Canada Bread Company Limited, is a leading manufacturer and marketer of value-added and nutritious fresh bakery products, including white, whole wheat and whole grain bread, rolls, bagels, and artisan breads..

One of the buildings left over from an initial layout was the Walther’s Cornerstone Sunrise Feed Mill.  I spent many of my summers on the Kawartha Lakes, near Lakefield, Ontario.  One of my favorite places to check out each year was the feed mill as you entered town.  While long gone, this was one of the first buildings that I ever purchased, with hopes that some day I would model the operation.  However, I could never seem to find the space for the structures.  However, this was a lit that I couldn’t bear to get rid of, so it became the Little’s Feed Mill, named after some friends of the family.   It sees maybe 1-2 cars per month.

Algonquin Forest Products is another forest products business along the KLR.  Algonquin obtains low-grade lumber and converts that raw material into premium quality finger joint lumber.

Muskoka Timber Mills offers a complete service - from cutting the tree to milling to produce top quality Canadian timber and lumber. Timber is available in any size, with lengths up to 32'.  While the Bracebridge location is actually bordered by rail (ONR) but doesn’t get rail shipments, I elected to add a rail siding to further enhance the business of shipping Ontario lumber.

ONRH&TS Convention

I belong to a great group that shares an interest in the Ontario Northland Railway, both present and historical operations, engines, and rolling stock. Once a year a multi day convention is held somewhere along the ONR's domain, to get everyone together for some railfanning, sharing stories and good old railroad fellowship. This year, for the second time in our groups history (2007 was the first OH meeting), the Ohio contingent of members have invited everyone north of the Peace Bridge to come and visit our local rail activities in northeast Ohio. We will be having our convention this year in Vermilion, Ohio. The convention includes a trip to the Age of Steam roundhouse, some local interest tours and layout tours. The dates are Thursday July 23-Sunday July 26^th.

It's roughly two months to the convention and as usual for most conventions or open houses, I have more things on the my list to complete than time actually allows. Fortunately, except for my new yard that is being built as I write this, all of my trackage was complete and in good running shape from last years NMRA National Convention held in Cleveland. However, as I look at the calendar, it's time to crank it up a notch and get busy with some scenery items and other details that I didn't quite get done over the winter. Of course, this all conflicts with a son's graduation from University, cutting the lawn, getting the boat ready for the water, etc. So I'm trying to make an effort to spend at least a couple of hours each night after the day’s chores and activities are done to spend time on the layout. Over the next few weeks, I intend to capture this on these pages so that attendees can get a feel for the layout before they arrive in Ohio.

The primary purpose is to have the railway serve several small to medium sized industries located in the rural locales of Ontario.  While not all had railroad access, I have tried to select industries which have a need for rail ops due to the type of raw materials which may be supplied or the finished goods which are produced. Most industries receive 1-2 railcars daily, although businesses such as the mine receive a train daily.  The KLR's traffic base includes forestry products (such as paper, pulpboard, dimensional lumber and pulpwood) along with mining and several other industries.  The rail line serves a number of growing customers including Sherwin Williams Canada, Quaker Oats, United Canadian Malting, Indusmin Canada, Beaver Lumber and Commonwealth Plywood to name a few.

The two largest industries on the layout include the Spruce Falls Pulp and Paper mill complex, which was modeled after the Tembec mills in Temiscaming, Quebec and Kapuskasing, Ontario.  The Unimin mine in Nephton, Ontario, which produces syenite (a mineral in the feldspar family used in glass making and ceramics), serves as another primary industry.  The Muskoka Timber Mills facility rounds out the largest areas of the layout.

Up to the time of the convention, my goal is to post some discussions about each of the industries found on the KLR so that convention attendees can get a feel for the layout, as well as what has changed since I had an open house for the 2007 convention.

Changes to the KLR ( or why did I really change this)?

I had the opportunity to be part of the LDSIG tour during the 2014 NMRA National Convention held in Cleveland, OH.  As part of the tour, layout owners were asked to report on what they would have done differently during a discussion session after the tours.  While I didn't have the opportunity to participate, it did get me thinking or maybe it actually solidified some thoughts I had been having while constructing and operating the KLR.  The things that got me thinking included:

1) Better organized dispatching yard with more storage tracks
2) More switching possibilities for my paper mill
3) Expanded sawmill operations
4) Removal of part of my backdrop

So I'm going to start this discussion with item #4, which I thought would be the easiest, however, did not quite turn out that way.  Years previously, I read an article in one of the various model rail magazines about using a thin plastic or some form of rolled aluminum as a backdrop.  The advantage was that it would go around curves and corners easily, as well as result in no seams, as one piece was roughly 25 feet in length, easily meeting my needs for the backdrop. The concept was that the material would slip into a plastic clip, which would hold it in place.  The problem was that the material didn't fit and stay in the clips as you unrolled it, even with all my helpers grabbing an edge.  As soon as part of an edge was inside the clip, another length of the roll would be coming out.  And no matter how much I tried to straighten it, the material always seemed to have a bow.  It also didn't take latex paint very well as I discovered, as the material had a very shiny and slick coating, which the article failed to mention.

So where is all this leading? I decided a few months ago to take down the rolled material and replace it with masonite sheets joined together.  While easy in concept, not as easy as I had hoped, since I had already placed scenery up to the background.  The first things to remove were all of the photo backdrops, as well as the trees and other items set up against the backdrop.  So far so good, no rips or tears in my photos.  The flexible material came down easily enough, with little disruption to the scenery, although again, it seemed to have a mind of its own and came out of the tracks at the wrong locations before I was ready for it.  Masonite was cut and put up this weekend and an initial coat of base paint applied. Unfortunately I forgot how much fun it is to paint masonite, especially the slick finished side. And during the work, I forgot to cover my brush, and perched it on a temporary support.  Well you can guess the rest, the brush still with paint on it, coming to rest on some new track waiting to be installed, resulting in a nice blob of white paint on the track.  Thankfully, the track was waiting to be secured and easily wiped up.  So now the paint is on and drying, ready for blue sky later this week.

Modeling a Forest Products Industry

Several weeks ago the mailman delivered some of  the remaining kits that I had purchased to support the start of my Muskoka Timber Ltd. operation, which is loosely based on the prototype in Bracebridge, Ontario.  This is one of my last modules to build on the KLR, and the ideas and planing for it have been in my mind for many years.  I had long ago chosen to model this type of sawmill operation, as I wanted to have a steady stream of log cars coming into a location, and rough sawn and finished lumber going out.  I justified the loading on log cars at at unlikely spot based on a railfan trip to the Matheson, Ontario, where log cars were being loaded just feet away from the passenger station and ONR tracks.  Although the Ontario Northland runs nearby and through Bracebridge, which fits in with my overall northern Ontario theme, unfortunately the prototype doesn't actually have any rail operations.  So I decided to combine the rail operations from the well documented Hull-Oakes sawmill operations in Monroe, Oregon, which I had a chance to visit while working in the Pacific Northwest, to the general layout of the Bracebridge operations.  This kind of modeling license is what I really like about the hobby, since it allows me combine the best aspects of similar business operations into my modeled world, while still keeping a large amount of reality and generating revenue for the railroad.

The first task was the hardest, trying to compress as much of the operations from both locations into a 2 ft by 6 ft module.  While that sounds like a large amount of space when planning, it turns out that it really isn't as large as one would think given some of the buildings I wanted to include, such as the saw mill, planing mill, tepee burner, several storage sheds, and dust collector(s). Now add at least two tracks and possibly a third track and you see the result is fairly busy area.  So much for trying to maintain my philosophy for the railroad that individual scenes would take up a realistic amount of space but not be overcrowded.  After all, the prototype in Bracebridge is about 500 feet wide by approximately 1/2 mile in length.  The first photo shows the outline of the saw mill, chip loader and the loading building (with the planing mill in the background).  Second photo shows that I was able to fit in my loading track, chip loading track, plus an additional track.  The initial ground cover, consisting of sculptamold, has been painted green and is awaiting further ground cover. The track has been test operated and all switches and track found to be operable.

The next step will be to start working on building details, including installing windows, stairs, and some weathering while working to add ground cover and some other details.