A Source for my Coking Coal
03/12/2006:
Here are some pics of the latest large structure I’ve added to the Iron Belt: an old favorite, the Walthers Cornerstone™
New River Coal Mine. This provides the origin of point-to-point coal traffic on my pike, which [of course] ends at the rotary dumper for the coke ovens.
I didn’t want this to be just another ‘vanilla’ out-of-the-box New River complex, so I did a few minor alterations. First, I painted the building sides ‘industrial’ green and the roofs black; also, I placed the truck tipple on the opposite side from the standard location. But most important, I installed tubes in the loading section to allow the pouring of granulated coal directly into the hopper cars below.
The Construction Process
As with all my styrene structure kits, I spray-painted the pieces in advance while still on the sprues [to make them easier to find at assembly time]. I some cases, roof pieces and wall sections were attached to the same sprue and were not easy to distinguish, so they wound up getting an undercoat of green which was later covered by flat black.
The first two photos show where I needed to widen the rectangular floor openings over the tracks to make room for the Plastruct tubes, and the round opening in the roof.
The next image gives you a general idea of what the tubes are designed for: Positioning a funnel for pouring-in powdered coal.
At this point, I figured I probably ought to verify that the tracks I had laid 6 months ago would line up correctly the building. As I expected, they did not; but what I hadn’t realized was how the latex covering I had applied would act like
glue and make the tracks nearly impossible to loosen and reposition. As the next two photos show, I had to slide a thin metal ruler underneath the ties to pry the track loose from the Styrofoam sub-roadbed without any damage. The track survived OK, but the Styrofoam got chewed-up:
One additional [unpleasant] discovery I made: You can’t always trust the little ‘footprint’ diagram that Walthers prints on the boxes of some of their kits. I had to move my ‘loose’ backdrop walls back an extra inch, because the finished mine building is actually
13 inches deep, NOT 12 as the diagram led me to believe!
The Finished Model
Originally I didn’t even want to include the truck tipple, because as I mentioned before, I prefer to have my structures
NOT resemble the Walthers catalogue/box pictures if I can avoid that. Then I decided, the auxiliary tipple with its conveyor added some nice complexity to the facility and it seemed a shame to let that go to waste. So I installed it on the
opposite side from where Walthers designed for it:
I covered the original conveyor opening with a 1-inch square of Evergreen™ slatted-board sheet, to make it resemble the intake for a large fan.
I still need to apply some ‘cinder’ ballast to the tracks, but the is the very last thing on my installation checklist.
”Pay No Attention to that Hand Behind the Curtain…”
As I mentioned earlier, this structure provides a point of origin for running live coal loads to my coke ovens. Much as I would have loved to make everything animated and remote-controlled, I lack both the skill and the patience to do it that way at present. So I opted to use detachable, hand-loaded funnels instead.
[In the next few example photos, let’s pretend this is a
limestone quarry instead of a coal mine – the coal I ordered hasn’t arrived yet.] Looking up close, the operator doesn’t even
see the funnel…
…until stepping farther back:
The coal will be prepared in pre-measured amounts of approximately 1.5oz., enough to pile it in a single mound (3 for a 40-foot hopper, 4 for 50-footers).
Three ‘scoops’ yielded 3 mounds in this sample 40-foot B&O hopper car:
I don’t want to pile it too high, since the motion of the train will cause settling and I need to allow space for that.
Here is what happens when the loaded hopper reaches its destination: The car empties its load [via rotary dumper] into a waiting bucket below, and the coal is made available for another round trip:
This is the last of the
large structures I plan to install on the layout in the near future, though I do plan to assemble some Kibri heavy machinery for the slag pit scene. Next on the list is to get the mainline track ballasted, then unpack the remainder of my mothballed rolling stock and put that on its new home.