The Shippers That Keep The Walla Walla Valley Busy

VALLEY YARD
 Interchange Yard with Northern Pacific
20 car capacity

I expanded the WWV into the closet in the back of the layout room to simulate the Northern Pacific-WWV interchange yard at the very north end of the railroad. Yard consists of four tracks--NP 1 and 2, WWV 1 and 2--with a total capacity of around 20 cars.

WWV CARBARN

 Just as wide as the prototype (61') but just 2/3rds of the prototype's 151', my version is alittle more comfortable with the small size of the layout. Constructed of DPM wall sections and styrene, the structure captures the "look and feel" of WWV's Cherry and N 13th St. carbarn after it was single-stalled in 1950 at the time of dieselization. Thanks to Ole
Melhouse for fabricating the roof for me.

Frozen Food Processor, outbound
Two car capacity
Mechanical refrigerators

A holdover industry from the WWT days, it shares a name but no physical resemblance to the shipper on the prototype WWV. Constructed of City Classics building sections. Track holds 2 mechanical refrigerator. Ships mainly asparagus and peas.

The big shipper of fresh fruit in the Walla Walla Valley, "Blue Mountain" ships strawberries and apples as well as prunes. This is the Walthers R.J.Frost kit opened up as a flat against the wall. Somewhat resembles the big concrete prune and fruit warehouse with the same name on the south side of Milton-Freewater served by WWV and UP.

MILTON BOX COMPANY

Scratchbuilt following the prototype building in Milton-Freewater served by WWV and UP, Milton Box manufactured shipping and field boxes from "box shook" lumber, and warehoused cardboard shipping crates. A quite distinctive "zig zag" roofline. I dislike the switchback getting into the spot, but this is a holdover from the original WWT track arrangement, exacerbated by the new
Termicold warehouse whose busy three-car spur must be emptied in order to
switch it.

Cold storage warehouse, inbound and outbound
Three car capacity
Ice bunker and mechanical refrigerator cars, insulated boxcars

A scaled down (approximately 60% of prototype size) model of the Termicold (currently Americold)
cold storage building constructed in the late 1960s on Walla Walla's south side. The model is a big generic concrete coldstorage building built from matte board. On my WWV, this is one of the busiest customers, with both loaded and empty mechanical refrigerators finding their way to the three-car spot. Warehousing of en-route frozen food exploded in the 1960s with the creation of "stop waybills," which would allow a shipper to stop a load en route, warehouse it for a period of time, and then reload and deliver it later under a single through rate. These "Stop" cars saved on storage space for the food's manufacturer and
transportation fees for the shipper.

PACIFIC FRUIT

The pale yellow City Classics kit located "aisle side", the prototype  building was built in 1950 on
the north end of the WWV in Walla Walla as a truck/rail terminal for
Consolidated Freightways, which received a wide range of merchandise-from
plastic tubs to refrigerator cars of Oleo-for distribution via CF trucks. In
later years, Pacific Fruit occupied the building. The spur handles two cars,
however switching the industry is complicated by the
single-car-and-locomotive switchback move off the team track.

TEAM TRACK

A one or two-car spot to a concrete ramp modeled after the Milton-Freewater
ramp built in the early 1960s. The "universal industry," the team track
allows me to ship cement hoppers, flatcars with farm equipment or pipe,
high-cube boxcars of appliances, or newsprint for the Walla Walla Union-Bulletin newspaper. The prototype WWV did a fair amount of team track
traffic with loads going to Consolidated  Supply and Stone Tractor Equipment
Co.

ROGERS CANNERY

The layout's largest shipper, requiring three switches a day to juggle inbound boxcars of tin cans and outbound RBL's bound for both the NP and UP (UP has about 1/3rd of the traffic). Building was constructed from DPM wall sections.

Bulk oil and petroleum products, outbound
Two car capacity (one car on pipes)
Tank cars  (oil), boxcars (misc. petroleum products)

 WWV served a Conoco jobber on the north side of
Walla Walla, a Shell jobber on the north side of Milton-Freewater, and a Standard Oil dealer on Milton-Freewater's south side. The Standard dealer's operation is nearly a dead-ringer for this group of buildings. Why Conoco? My childhood memories include those "Hottest Brand Going" ad campaigns. By the late 1960s, shipment of oil by rail was definitely in its final days, but WWV still delivers an occasional tank of oil from the Conoco refinery at Billings, Montana, as well as a rare boxcar or two of barrels of lubricants for industry or farmers. A Grandt Line kit with the field truck refueling dock grafted onto it.

Beverage distributor, outbound
Two car capacity
Insulated boxcars (beer and wine) 

Back before nationwide production and distribution agreements, beer sales in the US were largely of regional brands, and Bob Taylor, one of a number of distributors in Walla Walla, emphasizes the regional flavor by selling Olympia. This is back in the days when Schlitz and Miller were the biggest national brands. A car a week or so makes its way off UP's Olympia Branch at Tumwater to the two-car spur. A wall flat with Pikestuff metal walls.

BLUE MOUNTAIN GRAIN GROWERS

Boxcars and covered hoppers (outbound grain, inbound fertilizer and farm
chemicals), chemical tank cars (fertilizer and farm chemicals)
A fictional rival to Walla Walla Grain Growers, it never existed on the real WWV. The old wooden BMGG elevator(AMB Laser Kit) was recently expanded with steel Butler bins. Walla Walla County is a big grain producer, and the prototype WWV handled grain loads off its Yellowhawk branch from Baker-Langdon and from the Pendleton Grain Growers and Harris Elevators in Milton-Freewater. Rail is light on my grain spur, so most of the cars loaded here are 40-foot boxcars bound for elevators or mills in Portland, Vancouver, or Kalama, down the Columbia River. Most of this rail traffic is on borrowed time as dams on the Snake River will soon bring cheaper river transportation close to Walla Walla area grain growers.

BAER & SONS SCRAP METAL

Walla Walla had several railroad-served scrapyard, and still has one today (Stubblefield's). This shipper takes the name of a prototype WWV scrap metal shipper. The scrap pile is a well-glued mass of shredded aluminum foil cemented to a extruded foam core. The crane is just a cheapie from Bachman, a "place holder" for a better example later. Union Pacific gets nearly all the traffic out of Baer.

A Potlatch stud mill on the WWV is just a figment of my imagination, but I found it too hard to give up the variety of traffic generated by this scratchbuilt plastic sheet and kitbashed Walthers lumber mill structure. Union Pacific shares access to the mill with WWV, and while UP has most of the finished lumber haul, WWV pulls all the woodchip traffic, bound via the NP and SP&S to a paper mill in Camas, on the Columbia River near Vancouver.

UP's switcher emerges from behind the Potlatch mill with the WWV interchange cut and, later, its own cut of cars to switch out the mill. I'm not crazy about hidden staging anymore, and don't recommend it to anyone.

Allows me flexibility to run a Milton-Freewater train into staging or occasional sugar beet extra. Difficult to actively stage during a session, another reason I don't like hidden staging.