{"id":45,"date":"2012-10-09T11:49:43","date_gmt":"2012-10-09T16:49:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.lacentralrr.com\/2012\/10\/09\/the-spencer-logging-operation\/"},"modified":"2015-03-15T16:38:04","modified_gmt":"2015-03-15T21:38:04","slug":"the-spencer-logging-operation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lacentralrr.com\/Blog\/2012\/10\/09\/the-spencer-logging-operation\/","title":{"rendered":"The Spencer Logging Operation"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the featured industries on the layout will be the logging operation of the Spencer Lumber Company.\u00a0 Spencer’s mill will be located at the town of Oneida (on one of the layout’s peninsulas), and will be patterned somewhat loosely on the real-life mill of the former Crowell Long Leaf Lumber Company.\u00a0 The Crowell facility still lives as a museum here in Louisiana and I wrote a little piece about it in the blog post The Southern Forest Heritage Museum<\/em> back in June of 2011.<\/p>\n

The Crowell property has all the pieces in place for one to photograph and study, and while I can’t model the facility literally due to space constraints, it will at least allow me to include the vital infrastructure necessary for a lumber mill.\u00a0 Once you understand the work-flow and the function of the various buildings, planning a “correct” model should be much easier.<\/p>\n

However, the other part of the operation – the actual harvesting of the timber – had me scratching my head.\u00a0 I have a nice run from the mill up to the logging area, which even includes a double switchback, and I have a loading area at the top.\u00a0 But the space is so limited, especially in depth, that I just didn’t have any idea how I was going to model any sort of reasonable logging activity.\u00a0 A few weeks ago I spied a copy of Kalmbach’s book, The Model Railroader’s Guide to Logging Railroads<\/em>, so I purchased it.\u00a0 In general it is a nice book, with a good description of all the various facets of the logging industry.\u00a0 Admittedly if falls far short of being the definitive volume that one needs to pull off such a modeling endeavor; that would take many volumes to accomplish.\u00a0 However there was one short section in the book that provided me with my salvation.\u00a0 In short, it was the “reload” operation.\u00a0 This was a situation where trucks were used to haul the logs out of the woods, and to a reloading point where the logs were transferred from the trucks to the railhead.\u00a0 This became very common in the later years of railroad logging operations (which I will be modeling in 1964) as trucks and equipment were better able to penetrate into the forest.\u00a0 In fact, this method often became more economical than re-laying track to all the various cutting sites.\u00a0 This idea will be perfect for my line.\u00a0 All I need do is add some kind of loader at the high end (a McGiffert or a Barnhart) and I’ll be in business.<\/p>\n

While the logging operation won’t be the biggest traffic generator on the layout, I think it will be the most interesting, and I look forward to actually building it.<\/p>\n

-Jack<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of the featured industries on the layout will be the logging operation of the Spencer Lumber Company.\u00a0 Spencer’s mill will be located at the town of Oneida (on one of the layout’s peninsulas), and will be patterned somewhat loosely … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-45","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-operations","category-proto-research"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lacentralrr.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lacentralrr.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lacentralrr.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lacentralrr.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lacentralrr.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.lacentralrr.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":591,"href":"https:\/\/www.lacentralrr.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45\/revisions\/591"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lacentralrr.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lacentralrr.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lacentralrr.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}