My Grain Fleet

Three tracks of grain
Three tracks of grain

I recently gathered all of my grain fleet into one place on my layout, at the Cargill elevator tracks at Helene.

It turns out that I have a lot of grain cars!

The Cargill switcher
The Cargill switcher

A grain elevator would never get this congested “in real life” but it was interesting to see all of my grain hoppers and grain boxcars in one place. As my layout is a prairie railroad, I need a lot of grain cars.

The cars are a mixture of higher end cars like Intermountain, mid-range cars like Bachmann, and the low end Model Power type cars. I wrote about the differences between my grain cars before. I’d like to replace my Model Powers with some better cars… all in good time.

Even the grain boxcars made an appearance.

Grain boxcars
Grain boxcars – and a helicopter?

The grain boxcars are used on the Minnedosa line, to simulate shipments from light prairie branch lines. The elevators that are actually on my layout don’t use them.

The helicopter is from when my nephew was over last weekend. He likes to see the trains, and he jams papers, toy cars and whatever else he can find into the lumber cars, hoppers and flatcars as they roll past. He’s 4 so I’m totally OK with him doing that, under supervision. None of my cars are very fragile. 🙂

He also likes to drive trucks along the road by the grain elevator. Again, I’m totally OK with this!

After I took these photos, I ran a few extras to distribute the cars to the CP and CN staging yards in preparation for an operating session to deliver them to the appropriate elevators. It’s taking some time to get everything in position, but soon I hope to run a session! It’s been a while.