Prime Cereals
Prime Cereals represents part of a large food production plant in the mid 1970’s. It was inspired by pictures of Post Foods in Battle Creek, Michigan, which is one of the largest breakfast cereal production plants in the USA and is still in production today. The 1970’s were the peak for rail traffic with the variety of specialized grain hoppers and freight cars and before the
change to road haulage distribution.
We have tried to show how the trains are dwarfed by the very large buildings that surround them. The grain silos are over
100 scale feet tall. All the buildings are scratch built, the larger ones consist of several layers of MDF sprayed with textured paint to represent the concrete texture.
Track is all hand laid with the rail sitting on tie plates that are held in place by spikes into the wooden ties (sleepers). There are about 600 ties which were cut to size from wooden coffee stirrers. Approximately 2400 spikes were used. The rail is O Scale code 100 flat bottom which represents the lightweight rail that was used in the early 20th century.
Control is DCC using NCE PowerCab and LokSound decoders. Turnouts are operated via DCC using Arduino microcontrollers with custom servo control software.
US O Scale is 1⁄4 inch to 1 foot, i.e. 1/48th, which is slightly smaller than British O gauge, with a track gauge of 1 1⁄4 inch.
We wanted to build a layout that was a bit different than most, I think we achieved that.
Prime Cereals will be appearing at: