Out of the total silos throughout the Wimmera and Mallee, that are located on a rail line, I would say that the large majority are unused. There are a couple of reasons for this.
The first, a lot of the tall cement and adjacent silver steel silos have been condemned and are very unsafe.Particularly the cement ones, with chuncks of cement fall at any moment.
Another reason, when these structures where built, farmer Bill rolled up to the silo in his old chev truck with a load of either Barley or Wheat, it was that simple. Now a days there are literally dozens of grain segregations. The first year I was at Dimboola GrainFlow, we had 12 grades of wheat and barley as well as 2 grades of canola.
The tall cement silos hold about 1500 plus tonnes and the big silver steel ones any from 2000 to 5000 tonnes. There are plenty of farms around the Wimmera that could fill those small sites by them selves, let alone the neighbour !!
So over the past 10 to 20 years the trend has been to develop one large receival site, like Dimboola or Murtoa that excepts a large variety of grain and services a larger area.
In some places like Banyeena, between Murtoa and Rupanyup, a private grain consortium have taken over the use of a grain shed and silos, of what is largely a huge amount of infrastructure abandoned by
GrainCorp and left to fall into disrepair throughout rural Victoria.