Check out this 1955 video about grain operations in Canada. Lots of good railroad scenes but it also goes really in depth about how a grain elevator works. There is also a good scene of a tilt dumper used to empty the boxcar inside the elevator.
Here's another one from YouTube, also a Canadian video from 1981 about a small prairie elevator. Very entertaining, especially because one guy does the whole operation by himself, to include moving railcars by hand.
Prior to the late 1950's, most grain that traveled by rail was transported in boxcars. Covered hoppers for grain just weren't part of the picture yet. When 100-ton railcar trucks hit the scene in the late 1950's, the covered hopper became the preferred method because now the cars could handle the weight of a larger load of grain. Even in remote parts of Canada, boxcars were still used to transport some grain until the early 1990's. In a grain boxcar, a "grain door" made of wood or reinforced cardboard was put up inside the boxcar doors that covered the opening from the floor up about 3/4 the height of the opening. Flexible chutes were used to load the grain through the opening. To unload the grain from the boxcar, the wooden grain doors were either pushed inside by a hydraulic plunger or the heavy cardboard grain doors were simply just punctured to allow the grain to flow out. It was a dirty, dusty, manual labor job because the remaining grain had to be swept out of the boxcar by hand.
I was completely unaware of how grain elevators operated until just recently. Not sure if things were done the same way in USA as they were in Canada because grain handling is run by the Canadian Government unlike here in the US, but I would imagine things are similar. I was intrigued to learn how a single type of grain is "graded" and different grades of the same type of grain were separated at the elevator, and this was done for each different type of grain in the elevator.
Small elevators like the one in the video received grain from local farmers by truck and shipped it out by rail. Larger elevators would receive the railcars from the small elevators and would then ship the grain to the end user by rail or ship if the larger elevator was located at a port. They would make up cuts of cars for customers based on the type and grade of grain requested and where the customer was located. Large elevators located at Great Lakes ports (i.e., Toledo) would take in grain by rail or by Great Lakes freighter as well as ship it out the same way.
I see a lot of model railroads with a small grain elevator where a few hoppers get spotted during an operating session and there seems to be little thought about how they really work. I think there is great potential to model grain operations at a large elevator on a model railroad now that I know how they work.
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