Stock Yards and a Finished Warehouse

Howe & Smallwood have opened for business and are employing a number of Oakdale's citizens.

  At last, with all the delays, the Howe & Smallwood warehouse is finally finished. Alongside of it is a new corral so that the ranchers around Oakdale can ship their cattle on the Stockton & Copperopolis. As has been seen in previous posts, I cut one wall away from the building due to lack of benchwork space. This made cutting the roof trusses very interesting and necessitated all of the grain sacks but I think the effort was worth it.
 

These steers will have a while to wait to be loaded as there are presently no stock cars available for shipment.

 The corral was put together with pieces from a Walthers corral kit. If you look at the layout plan, you can see that the loading chute is just about right at a track switch. For corrals, that is not that bad. Corrals can be located on odd sections of track because cars are not usually spotted there long enough to matter. You can't load a carload of steers and let them set so the train has to be ready to leave town when the cars are loaded. How long does it take to load a car? I will be setting up a sound module with a recording of mooing steers. When the sound stops, one car is loaded. Spot the next car and do it again. Right now, I don't have any stock cars on the railroad so that traffic will have to wait a bit.
 

Jake, the foreman is exerting his authority to impress Mr. Howe, lounging in
the background.

Quite a number of figures were needed to complete this scene. The cows were prepainted by Woodland Scenics while the cowboys started out as unpainted Preiser figures. The boys in the warehouse were a combination of old cast metal Lytler & Lytler and Gandy Dancer figures that I have had forever. It was time to use them.
   Of course, wagons full of grain sacks had to be brought in my the farmers so I built up a couple of kits that I had in stock. The green wagon is a Lindsey which is made in the United Kingdom while the brown wagon was made by Imagine That Laser Art (www.imaginethatlaserart.com). It is laser-cut wood and very easy to assemble.

Farmers delivering grain are guided into position by warehouse workers.