South Louisiana rice mill tour

[bargetanika]

Part One – Prototype Observations and Comments.

I spent the better part of last Saturday looking at rice elevators and rice mills in south Louisiana, with the purpose of learning more about rice industry operations and to see if I could find buildings suited to model railroad size to photograph. We started in Rayne, la., went to Crowley, and on west to Jennings, which appeared to be toward the west end of rice country. The intent was to see as much as I could see and to photograph selected buildings on the return trip.

It became apparent very early that the handling and milling of rice appears to be pretty similar to wheat operations, because nearly all the elevators, silos, and storage buildings I saw were very similar to available HO scale wheat crop kits. Since all the prototypes are too large for a layout anyway, and since I don’t really know exactly what the operations entail, I elected not to photograph anything at this time, but to use the wheat industry kits available as needed, which appear to be largely suitable to rice operations.

It appeared that, in surrounding communities like Rayne, all of the large concrete storage silos and associated dryers are now abandoned, with no reason to take them down since there is no economic drive in these small towns to re-use the land. I believe that these big structures were built right around WW I, when the rice industry came to Louisiana, to collect, dry, store and then ship economically viable large quantities of rice to mills by rail. Every rice farm seems to now have the smaller scale cylindrical metal corrugated bins with elevator towers and dyers. I believe this means that each farmer now dries/stores his own grain and ships it individually to the mill, which circumvents the need for localized co op style dryer/storage silos, and has resulted in the abandonment of the large co op type drying/storage complexes…… and the need for rail service at that end of the rice industry, transportation of raw product to the mill.

I did see, in Midland I believe, one older rectangular very large very tall corrugated metal storage type building, apparently still in use, with a row of large fans running up near the roof which must be a very last communal dryer of some kind. I saw no other building like this anywhere.

Crowley appeared to be the rice milling center of the state. The milling complex was too vast to really take in and understand very well, extending well over a mile in length with the former T&NO mainline on the north side and the MP branch down from Eunice on the south side. Many of the sidings are still there, though orphaned and long since abandoned. Until 1948 the T&P was there too, and I believe that the MP took over some of the TP mill trackage, since the furthest east end of what had been the tail track of the MP mill spur wandered into woods and underbrush where I know that the TP had entered town.

At this mill complex, however, and at a couple of smaller ones, rail service is still very much in place for bulk outshipping of milled rice to distant packagers and food production companies, and rice hulls (“bran”) to other locations, perhaps fertilizer and livestock feed operations. This appeared to be almost all covered hopper oriented, with the loading occurring driven by air though chutes into the cars. All of this was under sheds for weather protection. Covered hoppers were everywhere in quantity.

I learned a lot from this day in the field, so to speak. In another message I’m going to describe how I propose to recreate some of this in model railroad form, and solicit comments and corrections.

[bargetanika]

A bonanza today. A guy stopped by the office who manages a riverfront grain loading facility. He confirmed as correct everything I had surmised about rice operations in southwest Louisiana. I’m good to go on the layout. I have a kit for concrete silos with elevator and a Walthers centennial mills kit. I’m going to scratch build a dryer since they are simple rectangles.

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