October update

 I think I'm calling the sand distributor "done" for now. I kept adding things.  Beyond just the building, I added a truck scale and the thing beneath it.  Best I can tell, they load sand into it, it rolls it around to separate out the finest particles, from which they can get a consistent product to ship.  I scratchbuilt this thing from a styrene tube, some styrene pieces, a couple pieces of corrugated styrene, and some surplus handrails and pipe.  I used a combination of Woodland Scenics ground cover, clumps, and some Heki tear apart tall grass that Thomas Klimoski used on his Georgia Northeastern layout. Like the rest of this - it's not perfectly to scale.  My aim was to get something that looks like it, rather than exactly like it. If I went a step further - I would have to build that dust collector in the process between this thing and the building. Whenever I drive past it on Route 5, I'm pretty pleased I came up with something that anyone looking at it would recognize.

At the prototype, I'm told they've been offloading the sand from lake freighters, which gets trucked across town to the Norfolk Southern yard and loaded onto covered hoppers. Once upon a time there were railroad tracks there. Apparently this is the cheapest way to do this right now.

Lessons learned:

1. Anything and everything you build looks better with some handrails/guardrails. 
2. Why did I make the circular towers so tall? Because that Walthers conical thing is that tall, and they needed to be taller based on the prototype. Don't be tough on yourself if something isn't exact. My steel mill isn't even close to the scale size it should be - but it still looks like a steel mill. Good enough.
3. I'm still annoyed that I made the shipping channel too deep.  But there's no fixing that at this point.  We have to pretend that it was a deep cut there and the freighters can onload on a higher level. Whatever.

What's next: I don't know. I'm not sure how to connect the scenery in that corner to the steel mill around the bend. Maybe it's time to do some scenery around the brewery.