Commodity storage in covered hoppers

[Gary S]

Glad to hear someone else has considered this and given it some thought. Considering the era when coal was still used for heating needs, it seems the perfect solution to meeting the winter demands. Instead of the mines trying to keep up with the need, they have plenty already loaded in hoppers.

Although it is a general rule of thumb that no industry on a layout should ship to another industry on the layout, I just see this as adding some nice variety.

Questions though... it is doubtful that GERN (or a coal producer) would be using some railroad's rollingstock for these purposes. I mean, they wouldn't want to be paying the per diem rates for those cars to be sitting in a storage yard for months. So, the cars would either be owned or leased by the company... sound right? So... looks like I will be needing a bunch of GERN LOs.... but absolutely nothing wrong with that!! Hey DocWayne, I hope you have lots of leftover road numbers.

I guess I would need storage tracks for the loaded covered hoppers, but also for the returning empties.

On that note, I was also thinking of using the yard as storage for empty home road boxcars too. I may have to add a few more tracks!