The Hungry Hound Café is at home on the corner of Richter St and Recreation Avenue and if you don’t feel like going inside you can find a seat outside in the sun and watch engine 2632 work the spur at OK Ready Mix. This day found a pretty typical shipment being moved around. Bulkhead flats with wrapped dimensional lumber or plywood for Asia, 50-foot tank cars from Procor and CornProducts are worked at SunRype and covered hoppers, full and empty, occupy the siding at the cement plant.
The cement facility is a classic small industry that’s hard to overlook with its four vertical hoppers and a tall elevator distributor on one side of the truck loader and a bright red building and a smaller elevator on the other. So good in fact I plan to find room for this one last major building on my own layout. There’s one place left for just such a structure and a friend has already built a mixer truck that really works. A little small at 1/32nd but no one will notice.
The lumber shipment indicates this train has just returned from the big Riverside Sawmill – now Tolco – on the shore of Okanagan Lake. The mill is EOT for the Kelowna Pacific in the Valley and it fans out there into four spurs that handle plywood, cut lumber and long strings of deep, 50-foot sawdust hoppers that will eventually wind up at partial board and MDF plants elsewhere in the valley.
