Agricultural supply centers


JeffShultz

Stay off the tracks!
One big railroad dependent (or nearly so) industry in the Willamette Valley of Oregon are agricultural supply centers.

These boil down to two basic types - those doing fertilizer and those doing cattle feed.

The fertilizer ones in this area are larger, since they have to have actual storage space.

Wilco Ag Co-Op facility in Stayton, OR (right side of tracks, with tanks and silos):
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Another view - I don't think the buildings on the left are part of Wilco:
P1000318_001.sized.jpg


Another Wilco site, this one outside Silverton, OR:
P1000354.sized.jpg


The cattle feed ones are generally transshippment points and look a lot like team tracks - in these cases the hopper & boxcar loads are going straight into trucks to be taken directly to the customer, who is responsible for storage. I imagine that the loads get "stored" in the cows rather quickly.

Cattle feed transloader in St. Louis, OR:
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White's Hauling, Hopmere, OR:
Whites_Hauling_Hopmere_8.sized.jpg


For cattle feed you're talking soybean meal and corn distilates in the covered hoppers, and cottonseed bales in the boxcars.
 
Yep - this is from the trip a couple years back. We need to go out and do that again.

Here is another shot of the Silverton facility:
P1000356.sized.jpg
 
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I think I'll need to add room on my layout for one of those transload facilities. Good for another car on the "Ony Local."
 
Hopmere is the name of the "area" - one of those railroad station names that stuck. It is named after one of the primary local agricultural products - Hops.

In fact, those low yellow buildings you see just beyond the White's Hauling siding are hop warehouses.
 
Jeff, Here's a few photo's of a fertilizer bulk plant in Clewiston, Fl. These photo's have been on this forum before. Quite a few years ago. These photo's were taken in 1987, but the place hasn't changed much since then. Those nice new colored liquid fertilizer tanks are slightly discolored & rusty.
The rails going to the bulk unloading area are still warped & out of alignment.
 
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Someplace in all my photo's I took a lot of pictures of a Brewery in Kentucky. It had a lot of road railers around it. Maybe I can locate them in the next cpl. days.

The fertilizer plant above had 3 sidings behind the building for loading & unloading powdered & liquids.
 



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