PilbaraRail
New Member
Looking good Ken. Cant wait to see the final product of all this.
Mitchell
Mitchell
Iron Belt layout - track laid (plan w/photos)
- Thread starter IronBeltKen
- Start date
IronBeltKen
Lazy Daydreamer
Here are the 'fruits' of my most recent effort: A collection of coal loads to fill a unit train. Spent a few hours Saturday, plus all day Sunday, making these guys:
The LHS owner wasn't joking when he said they are labor-intensive [I had just politely declined his suggestion to special-order a bunch of Chooch's]. Even if I had could afford the commercial ones, I still would have needed to grind them down slightly so they would fit loosely enough to fall out of their respective cars when flipped on the rotary dumper.
I still have the infrastructure and more than enough Black Beauty to run live loads, but that approach makes a huge amount of dust - so I prefer to save that type of operating for special occasions only.
The LHS owner wasn't joking when he said they are labor-intensive [I had just politely declined his suggestion to special-order a bunch of Chooch's]. Even if I had could afford the commercial ones, I still would have needed to grind them down slightly so they would fit loosely enough to fall out of their respective cars when flipped on the rotary dumper.
I still have the infrastructure and more than enough Black Beauty to run live loads, but that approach makes a huge amount of dust - so I prefer to save that type of operating for special occasions only.
Hello Mitchell, haven't seen you in a long while - thanx for stopping in!PilbaraRail said:
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PilbaraRail
New Member
No problem Ken. forgot my password for a while and havent been able to post but i've been keeping up with the blog. Impressive i must say.
Mitchell
Mitchell
IronBeltKen
Lazy Daydreamer
Slippery slopes - NOT
04/04/06
I hadn't really expected to have any new pix to display this week, since my original goal on Friday was to clear all the layout track areas so I can start placing all my rolling stock on the rails. But as it often happens, when I cleared the tools and paint cans away from certain areas I was reminded of 'little' tasks that should probably be performed ASAP. One of these was to decorate the slag canyon, where my thimble cars supposedly dump their loads. It hadn't been on my radar screen because it is not on the center peninsula and didn't involve assembling/kitbashing a structure.
What had been obvious to me since the time I had glued down the MDF, was that those perfectly straight lines and corners did not belong - they made the pit look too much like a basement excavation for a large building. Luckily I had my Hot Wire foam knife that I had bought at the February train show in Timonium, so I made quick work of putting in those sloping sides:
I knew there would have to be an underlying surface of light-colored dirt and grass/weeds, so I glopped down a layer of yellowish-brown latex with Woodland Scenics 'burnt grass' green powder. Then I covered the dumping slope and the pit floor with extra-fine textured WS 'cinders' ballast.
I still needed some way to represent slag that been been poured over the slope, and solidified. The dilemma was that Elmers glue hardened too slowly and shrank from its original wet volume. Epoxy cement would have done the job nicely except it was way too expensive - this seemed like an awful waste of such a material. Then I remembered the several dozen 'hot glue' sticks I had leftover from my early layout construction - voila!
However, painting them in PollyScale Grimy Black did not hide a major weakness in the glue globs' appearance: The surfaces were too smooth and shiny to look like cooled slag.
So on Monday I dashed to my LHS and picked up a bag of WS coarse-grained cinder ballast and some more Elmers white glue. I added just enough water to make the Elmers a bit more fluid, then mixed in enough coarse cinders to make a slurry:
I spread a layer of this concoction over all the hot-glue globs, making larger clumps at the bottom; the leftover mixture [shown in the disposable plate below] was used to make free-sitting chunks for placement in my Kibri machines.
I found the coarse slurry hardened in place on the following day. This time I decided not to have my heavy equipment models appear in the pit while the thimble cars were in the 'pouring' position:
The machines are moved into the dump area when the slag begins to solidify, oftentimes it is still glowing hot - that is why the loaders have chain mesh covering their tires for protection from the heat. The crane [toward the left] is equipped with a wrecking ball which gets dropped onto the solidified slag, to break it into manageable-sized chunks.
Believe it or not, that loader is truly HO-scale - it is huge, like a prototype I had the privilege to see operating at the USS Great Lakes works on Zug Island near Detroit, MI.
This might have been one of the more fun of my modeling projects, if I hadn't learned on Monday that my electric bill is about to increase by ~$600/month. That's 4 times my monthly MRR budget!
This has been hanging over my head like a black cloud ever since I learned of it. Hope another 15-year sabbatical from the Hobby will not be necessary...
04/04/06
I hadn't really expected to have any new pix to display this week, since my original goal on Friday was to clear all the layout track areas so I can start placing all my rolling stock on the rails. But as it often happens, when I cleared the tools and paint cans away from certain areas I was reminded of 'little' tasks that should probably be performed ASAP. One of these was to decorate the slag canyon, where my thimble cars supposedly dump their loads. It hadn't been on my radar screen because it is not on the center peninsula and didn't involve assembling/kitbashing a structure.
What had been obvious to me since the time I had glued down the MDF, was that those perfectly straight lines and corners did not belong - they made the pit look too much like a basement excavation for a large building. Luckily I had my Hot Wire foam knife that I had bought at the February train show in Timonium, so I made quick work of putting in those sloping sides:
I knew there would have to be an underlying surface of light-colored dirt and grass/weeds, so I glopped down a layer of yellowish-brown latex with Woodland Scenics 'burnt grass' green powder. Then I covered the dumping slope and the pit floor with extra-fine textured WS 'cinders' ballast.
I still needed some way to represent slag that been been poured over the slope, and solidified. The dilemma was that Elmers glue hardened too slowly and shrank from its original wet volume. Epoxy cement would have done the job nicely except it was way too expensive - this seemed like an awful waste of such a material. Then I remembered the several dozen 'hot glue' sticks I had leftover from my early layout construction - voila!
However, painting them in PollyScale Grimy Black did not hide a major weakness in the glue globs' appearance: The surfaces were too smooth and shiny to look like cooled slag.
So on Monday I dashed to my LHS and picked up a bag of WS coarse-grained cinder ballast and some more Elmers white glue. I added just enough water to make the Elmers a bit more fluid, then mixed in enough coarse cinders to make a slurry:
I spread a layer of this concoction over all the hot-glue globs, making larger clumps at the bottom; the leftover mixture [shown in the disposable plate below] was used to make free-sitting chunks for placement in my Kibri machines.
I found the coarse slurry hardened in place on the following day. This time I decided not to have my heavy equipment models appear in the pit while the thimble cars were in the 'pouring' position:
The machines are moved into the dump area when the slag begins to solidify, oftentimes it is still glowing hot - that is why the loaders have chain mesh covering their tires for protection from the heat. The crane [toward the left] is equipped with a wrecking ball which gets dropped onto the solidified slag, to break it into manageable-sized chunks.
Believe it or not, that loader is truly HO-scale - it is huge, like a prototype I had the privilege to see operating at the USS Great Lakes works on Zug Island near Detroit, MI.
This might have been one of the more fun of my modeling projects, if I hadn't learned on Monday that my electric bill is about to increase by ~$600/month. That's 4 times my monthly MRR budget!
This has been hanging over my head like a black cloud ever since I learned of it. Hope another 15-year sabbatical from the Hobby will not be necessary...
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grande man
Bonafied Grande Nut
Things are looking great Ken! I love those coal loads. They should make for a great looking coal drag.
IronBeltKen
Lazy Daydreamer
Thanx Eric, that coal drag will be the 'flagship' train of the pike, a point-to-pointer [New River mine to rotary dump].grande man said:
IronBeltKen
Lazy Daydreamer
jbaakko said:
Two reasons:
(1) My family's been on "budget billing", where the electric company (BGE) does a once-a-year recalculation of the monthly bill based on average usage. They apparently had just done the annual recalc at the beginning of March 2005 - right before I installed my garage heat pump. So I've been in blissful ignorance of the fact that apparently our usage doubled - until they just sent us a bill that was double what we previously paid. It jumped from $265 to $475.
(2) BGE has been under a rate freeze since the year 2000 - which happens to be the year we moved into this house. When that rate freeze expires in July, the rate per KWhr will increase by 72%. This means our monthly bill will jump to $817.
I can't pull that money out of my hat!
Ken, that is a very real looking slag dump. Like your idea in making slag. It sure is fun watching your mill operations progress. (I wanta play! I wanta play!)
Plus $$$600/mon $$$$!! Gads! That is horrible and totally unreasonable. I have to wonder how much longer the public is going to allow being screwed by the utility and petroleum companies. Neither of the political parties seem to give a rats a**!
Plus $$$600/mon $$$$!! Gads! That is horrible and totally unreasonable. I have to wonder how much longer the public is going to allow being screwed by the utility and petroleum companies. Neither of the political parties seem to give a rats a**!
malcolm g smith
New Member
great layout,a bit bigger than mine, only 8'x4'feet
IronBeltKen
Lazy Daydreamer
Yes Don, there have been a few - but none of them were steel mill-related.don_csx said:
Maybe I should append some of my latest projects here for consistency...
For the week preceeding 04/23/06: A propane gas distribution center built totally from Plastruct and Evergreen (except the Ford C-series trucks, which are Athearn's). I'll start with an overall view:
Here is a closeup of the tank car unloading platform with 2 propane trucks parked in front:
The next image shows the warehouse/office building. The propane tank trucks started as stake trucks like the one shown.
---------------------------------
For the week preceeding 05/01/06:
Here is a secondhand already-assembled 7-Eleven store a that friend gave me. I still haven't thought up a name for this area yet...
A broader view of the above scene. I wanted to emphasize the highway "disappearing" behind the trees via forced perspective:
I also spent some time experimenting with WS EZ-water. I'm naming this little body of water Bethel Creek, I wanted to setup a "perspective" view to make it appear as if the riverbed curves off to the left under the bridge, and on into the distance:
For the week preceeding 05/08/06:
First, I added a fallen tree and some ripples to Bethel Creek -
Next, I upgraded a standard LifeLike Kentucky Fried Chicken eatery to match today's prototypes.
First, a "BEFORE" view:
...now, an "AFTER" view:
A view from the rear, looking up the road:
HINT: The KFC is not the only thing that has changed. Aside from the automobiles and the paint schemes on the locos, can anybody identify another object in the 2000 photo that is radically different from the way it looked in the 1970 photo?
For the week preceeding 05/12/06:
Had to take a temporary [albeit unwanted] break from modeling and scenery, to prevent a potentially unpleasant scenario. After reading yet another horror story in the Model Railroader forum about a train going over the edge, I figured I better stop procrastinating and cover my edges pronto!
So, here is what I did to keep my engines and rolling stock from taking the 48-inch swan dive during a derailment - while still getting decent views for layout photography [my excuse for not doing anything so far]:First, I went to my local Home Depot and bought two sheets of thin plexiglas, 48"x36", then sliced these into 4"x48" strips:
[NOTE: Since plexiglas is such a tough material, I had to scratch-over each scoring line about 12-15 times to get a straight break - even then they didn't always break smoothly. But I wasn't too overly worried about physical beauty as long as they kept my DCC-and-sound-equipped locos from being turned into paperweights.]
I wanted to be able to quickly hang and/or remove the plexiglas sections easily, so I drilled several slip-over holes along the bottom edge of each strip:
Here's a close-up view:
Next, I put some drywall screws [wide head, narrow shaft] into the border area benchwork, with the head sticking out ~one-eighth of an inch. Then I slipped the plexiglas over the head thru the wide part of the hole, hanging it on the narrow part:
Here is a view of one of the pieces installed. Doesn't offer a very good view for taking pictures though does it...?
...but hey, nada problem! We'll just slip it off while we park the train
Hopefully this will save a train or two...
.
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IronBeltKen
Lazy Daydreamer
I'm Baaaaack.....!
05/22/06
Hi,
Betcha thought I made the 48-inch drop off the face of the earth huh? Well, truth is I've been awfully busy trying to finalize the layout for a presentation I'll be doing in Philly at the National, as part of the "Steel" track. I want to have as many areas scenicized as possible, since I know people don't want to come all the way across the country to see just another Plywood Pacific.
I had hoped to have all layout surface areas de-cluttered, and all trains re-installed, on Saturday - so I could begin shooting photos on Sunday. As luck [a-k-a Murphy's Law] would have it, I discovered that I was missing some so-called "process elements" that I consider critical; so I wound up spending lots of time doing additional hard-core work (the wet, messy kind) and falling behind another 12 hours! Life is tough when you're a model railroader with ADHD...
The main distraction of this weekend was the large coal stockpile that is located near the coke ovens. And the reason I considered it "critical" was so I could show where the excess coal goes after being dumped from the hoppers, when the coke ovens are operating at full capacity.
Tuna salad, anyone?
I know that's what the mixture below resembles <LOL>!
...but what it really is, is a mixture of sawdust and watered-down Elmers Glue:
I needed to make a base that had the general shape of a coal stockpile, and I figured sawdust would be the cheapest if not the most effective means to that end. I had 6 lbs. of Abrasives Depot "Black Beauty" coal granules, but that by itself wouldn't make nearly a large enough pile.
First, I cut-up a few chunks of leftover MDF as a 'core' base and positioned them accordingly:
Next, I began trowelling-on the "tuna salad" sawdust mush for the bottom slope...
...continuing with the second layer...
...until the whole base was formed:
While the Elmers was still wet, I took the opportunity to sprinkle-on the first layer of Black Beauty:
While it was drying, I finalized the scenery on other areas of the layout. When I came back to the coal pile, I realized that I needed some way to "explain" how the pile was formed since the ore bridge doesn't reach that area. I remembered seeing some type of combination "conveyor/silo"-type mechanism at some regional electric power plants, where the coal - after being transported by conveyor - gets dumped from the top of a series of tall cylindrical towers, where it keeps piling up higher and higher until bulldozers rearrange the material. My model is a "quick-n-dirty" placeholder that vaguely suggests the concept; I'll go back and superdetail it later. BTW, since I didn't have time to setup my tripod, I had to use the flash - so the 'silo' at the center of the stockpile looks white, but it is actually aged concrete with a thin film of grimy-black "coal dust" on it. You'll see that when I take the "quality" photo later on...
...and that's all I'm posting for today. I'll post the entire collection of Philly photos on my website after the Show in July [see you there?]
05/22/06
Hi,
Betcha thought I made the 48-inch drop off the face of the earth huh? Well, truth is I've been awfully busy trying to finalize the layout for a presentation I'll be doing in Philly at the National, as part of the "Steel" track. I want to have as many areas scenicized as possible, since I know people don't want to come all the way across the country to see just another Plywood Pacific.
I had hoped to have all layout surface areas de-cluttered, and all trains re-installed, on Saturday - so I could begin shooting photos on Sunday. As luck [a-k-a Murphy's Law] would have it, I discovered that I was missing some so-called "process elements" that I consider critical; so I wound up spending lots of time doing additional hard-core work (the wet, messy kind) and falling behind another 12 hours
! Life is tough when you're a model railroader with ADHD...The main distraction of this weekend was the large coal stockpile that is located near the coke ovens. And the reason I considered it "critical" was so I could show where the excess coal goes after being dumped from the hoppers, when the coke ovens are operating at full capacity.
Tuna salad, anyone?
I know that's what the mixture below resembles <LOL>!
...but what it really is, is a mixture of sawdust and watered-down Elmers Glue:
I needed to make a base that had the general shape of a coal stockpile, and I figured sawdust would be the cheapest if not the most effective means to that end. I had 6 lbs. of Abrasives Depot "Black Beauty" coal granules, but that by itself wouldn't make nearly a large enough pile.
First, I cut-up a few chunks of leftover MDF as a 'core' base and positioned them accordingly:
Next, I began trowelling-on the "tuna salad" sawdust mush for the bottom slope...
...continuing with the second layer...
...until the whole base was formed:
While the Elmers was still wet, I took the opportunity to sprinkle-on the first layer of Black Beauty:
While it was drying, I finalized the scenery on other areas of the layout. When I came back to the coal pile, I realized that I needed some way to "explain" how the pile was formed since the ore bridge doesn't reach that area. I remembered seeing some type of combination "conveyor/silo"-type mechanism at some regional electric power plants, where the coal - after being transported by conveyor - gets dumped from the top of a series of tall cylindrical towers, where it keeps piling up higher and higher until bulldozers rearrange the material. My model is a "quick-n-dirty" placeholder that vaguely suggests the concept; I'll go back and superdetail it later. BTW, since I didn't have time to setup my tripod, I had to use the flash - so the 'silo' at the center of the stockpile looks white, but it is actually aged concrete with a thin film of grimy-black "coal dust" on it. You'll see that when I take the "quality" photo later on...
...and that's all I'm posting for today. I'll post the entire collection of Philly photos on my website after the Show in July [see you there?]
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enjineerbill
Avid People Watcher
Nice work Ken. Love the KFC update, BTW, what was the "other" radical update? I'm not very good at these kinda things .
Johnny
I'm not very good at these kinda things .Johnny
SpaceMouse
Fun Lover
Dang it Ken, every time I think I am doing good, I learn that I have a long way to go.
