Gavilon Fertilizer Dist.

So long 2018!
This past year was not a good year and I for one am glad it's over.  It's been a trying year with my knee injury lasting until March and the rest of the year was filled with a lot of personal work.  We finally convinced my mother to move to a retirement community and the rest of my summer was filled getting her house and property ready to sell, by the end of the summer we wrapped that up.  

I still need to get my garage organized as it's full of stuff from Mom and Dads garage that I inherited.   That will take some time yet, but little by little I hope to have that wrapped up by Spring or Summer.

The Fall and Winter months of this year I worked in the basement trying to organize that mess as well.  So I'm hoping that 2019 will be a little bit more relaxed.

After wrapping up some more of the Bench Projects I've been working on like the pulpwood flats and some tank cars, I want to get started on the layout once again.

Here's where I left off in March. 
In Haskell I was working on Gavilon Fertilizer.  I had planned that Gavilon was to be a fertilizer plant that made both granular and liquid fertilizer.  After discussing the idea with some friends, it was decided that a manufacturing complex may be too large for the real estate I had available.  What they suggested was to create a smaller fertilizer distributor.  So be it.

This distributor was actually served by another shortline railroad that had recently shut down and had abandoned the line which left Gavilon without rail service.  Rock Island had decided to add a shoe fly from their tracks in Haskell so they could restore rail service to Gavilon. 

Recently, I've been itching to get some ballast down in Haskell with the backdrop done and the tracks painted, but I first wanted to get the grade crossing installed before hand.  When I installed the grade crossing for Crushmoore Ind a few years ago, I did after I ballasted and found it was kind of a pain to get them installed properly.  I had to scrape a lot of the ballast out of the way first.  This time I was going to install the crossing first then ballast up to it.

But this meant I had to figure out where I wanted it first and in order to do that I needed to know where the buildings would sit so as to make things line up.  So I dug out a few kits that I had on hand and ordered a few more.  I got started on some of the buildings before March.  

First were the tank car loading platforms.  These are the Tomytec version I had picked up, but later I decided to try some platforms that I found on Shapeways.  They are still in the box and I need to dig them out and get them ready to paint.  They should be a little more to scale and a bit more prototypical looking, although these platforms aren't too bad.

I had at first planned to use several of the Tomytec Spherical tanks but decided to use a more traditional design since this would be a distributor rather than a manufacturer.

These two small corrugated buildings are made by Deluxe and will be the pump houses from the platforms to the tanks and from the tanks to the truck filling station.

I wanted a shed to cover the hoppers that unload the dry granules to keep them out of the weather while unloading.  So I picked up another Pike Stuff kit like I used for the chip loader at Crushmoore Ind.  These are great modular kits that can resized in several ways.  I made this one with only two wall sections unlike the one I used for Crushmoore where I used three sections.

Here it is sitting over the tracks on a platform made from MDF and covered with styrene for a concrete pad next to some PVC silos.  The tubes were scraps from model sprues and conical sections are LEGO parts.  The elevator is a Rix kit.

I plan to use the M.A.C. building from Pike Stuff for the main building.  This will be the next project, getting it assembled and painted.  I'll paint it to match the smaller pump houses and unloading sheds.  Once I get that far I can then get the buildings placed so I can know where the crossing will go and I can start ballasting.

I'm hoping that 2019 allows me a little more time with the layout so I can make further leaps and bounds on scenery, I'm getting tired of seeing the ceiling tile...