[tsofian]

Originally Posted by cosmicfish

Yes, I have been out west, and yes, there are grain elevators... in farming territory. If the land is commercially viable for agriculture, then there are farmers, and towns, and lots of other stuff that you would prefer to keep away from your super-secret underground command base.

There were at least three on I-70 past Grand Junction and you can't call that farmland at all


You don't have to... but the challenge, as you note later, is in camouflaging the traffic in and out of the base, and that is going to be really hard to do when you have substantially varying amounts of traffic. One way to address that is to just shut down the site once you are done with the bulk of the work... but that doesn't work for agricultural property because it is tied to the actual land. You can shut down a mine (mine's are always temporary) or a distribution center (just move it elsewhere), but farms don't stop, they only get replaced with higher-density usage. So shutting it down without putting in a shopping mall or real estate development would be unusual and suspicious.

No grain elevator every went out of business? I have seen a lot of abandoned grain elevators on my travels

Sure, but grain elevator rail operations generally happen in the open, and farmers usually take notice. You can put a lot of things in these railcars, but you can't discretely unload them. Additionally, I would note that you can't fit everything in those railcars and would have a hard time explaining why a helicopter, for example, is getting unloaded at a grain elevator. And farmers usually keep track of each other, in my experience - they are likely to note the unusual traffic and question why this set of farms is doing so much more traffic than their own.

They do "generally happen in the open but there are a lot that have covered bays. I did a quick search of images and found plenty of them. Heck they could be part of a small repair facility attached to the grain elevator. There is absolutely nothing strange about a repair shop having doors that close, especially in crazy hot summers and awful winters.