Operating rotary coal dumper


kjd

kjd

Go make something!
Back when my oldest daughter was a baby, a friend gave me a Walthers model of a rotary dumper to empty coal trains. I could never get it to work right, it was more poseable than operational. Anyway, I messed with a few years and now my daughter is a junior and looking at colleges and I got it to work. Actually, I didn't get it to work, I gave up and made a (mostly) metal one that does work. It is a different design than the Walthers one. The biggest changes are the base and clamps. The new base is ball bearing trunnions instead of the plastic thing Walthers used. The clamps are an older style clamp that lowers with gravity and then is held in place with a sprung brake that stops the chain (string) from moving. I also made an indexer to precisely place the cars into the dumper.

Here are a couple videos, one before paint showing the dumper and one after paint showing the indexer and then the dumper.


You can tell it's a work in progress by the loose wires and blue tape.
 
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Was it you who made rotating #5 couplers for one end of each car, and also had a loader tower (which used to pop up occasionally across the page top), also used crushed, colored walnut shells for the coal loads?
Here's the loader
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Guilty as charged. I can finally unload all those coal trains that have been doing laps on my layout. The loadout you showed was in Railroad Model Craftsman in 2010, I think.
 
kjd said:
Guilty as charged. I can finally unload all those coal trains that have been doing laps on my layout. The loadout you showed was in Railroad Model Craftsman in 2010, I think.
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IIRC, you had the dumper working using the Walthers one but mounted against a backboard. A really big improvement with this one.
 
Great work Paul, way up there on the cool factor!
I have one for wood chip cars that I’ll be modifying.
 
tootnkumin said:
IIRC, you had the dumper working using the Walthers one but mounted against a backboard. A really big improvement with this one.
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Thanks, Toot, I like it a lot better too. The old one is also in a module but this one's module is smaller. I just had a friend help me with dyeing more walnut shell coal and this time it came out black instead of purple. I hope she won't mind if I show up with 10 pounds worth.

Rico, what are you modifying? For chip cars I think it works ok. I borrowed your tag line about being unsupervised at work the other day, and they bought it.
 
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Very nice,I like that it's metal. A guy in our club built one years ago (80's I believe) and is still working even though it's mostly plastic. It's scratch built from the one in Somerset NY. I like how your clamps hold the car,his has a separate motorized clamp.
 
Tom, I made my rotary couplers from Doug's (guy that built the dumper in Tom's post) description I saw online almost 20 years ago. I wish somebody would produce them, I could use a bunch more. I like the loadout you built to go with the dumper. What do you use for coal?

On weight, my dumper weighs about 1 lb 5oz (600 grams) the Walthers dumper about 4 oz (110 grams).
 
Paul, I uses regular black blast in my coal loader. I load Doug's train then he runs to the other side to the dumper and unloads.
 
Tom, can you tell more about the operations? How many cars at a time? I think you mentioned the silos are filled with coal by air, how does that work? I'm considering ways to fill my loadout as it only holds 19 loads, 20 if I load them short. I've also had challenges using DCC to get the trains to run slowly enough to load the train. I have two locomotives with TCS decoders so I can use BEMF and so far the best results have them in an advance consist and use F6 to turn off the BEMF when not loading or unloading. Like your dumper, the postioner is on the empty side so the locomotives spot the first three cars.
 
kjd said:
Tom, can you tell more about the operations? How many cars at a time? I think you mentioned the silos are filled with coal by air, how does that work? I'm considering ways to fill my loadout as it only holds 19 loads, 20 if I load them short. I've also had challenges using DCC to get the trains to run slowly enough to load the train. I have two locomotives with TCS decoders so I can use BEMF and so far the best results have them in an advance consist and use F6 to turn off the BEMF when not loading or unloading. Like your dumper, the postioner is on the empty side so the locomotives spot the first three cars.
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The silo when full can load about 28 cars. The coal is put into a paintball reservoir and the lid is sealed. Air from a compressor is added to the tube before the reservoir. The air draws the coal into the tube and into the silo. As for the engines you have to program the for the 128 speed step. I run mine about #2 on the controller and it creeps right along. The dumper that Doug built was from the blueprints from the Somerset dumper at the coal plant in Somerset,NY. If you look at the video the first building is where the heaters are, to thaw the cars in the winter. The next the dumper then the car indexter. Once the first three cars are empty the engines are cut off and the indexter takes over.
 
I wasn't looking for anything in particular, maybe a slow overview as a train is loaded. Often the threads I've seen about Doug's dumper ask if the poster also filmed the loader.
 
kjd said:
I wasn't looking for anything in particular, maybe a slow overview as a train is loaded. Often the threads I've seen about Doug's dumper ask if the poster also filmed the loader.
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In February we have a show where I'll hopefully have the loader there. I have some upgrades that I'll be doing in the next few months in the meantime.
 
I´d like to show that the Walthers/Cornerstone rotary dumper could be brought to motorized function but some modifications are necessary to secure a proper working:

 
Oh, WOW! When did rotary dumpers come in on the prototype? Even if I wanted one, I suspect the early 1950's was before those came into being.
 
trailrider said:
Oh, WOW! When did rotary dumpers come in on the prototype? Even if I wanted one, I suspect the early 1950's was before those came into being.
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The interwebs say large facilities like Lamberts Point in the 1950s, more common in the 1960s but there were much earlier rotary dumpers used in Colorado transferring ore from narrow to standard gauge cars.

Another discussion pointed out that the Walthers dumper was introduced with their paper making series and is intended for wood chip cars, hence the larger size. As a compromise, you can cut it down to fit coal cars. I did that once and I could never get it to work well, the walnut shell coal kept getting in the gears that turn it. Also the clamps had to be modified, they don't have enough range to clear the locomotives and still grab the cars.

I would consider the Walthers dumper poseable and not really animateable. It can be made animateable but isn't robust enough to withstand much use without a lot of modifications.
 
Here is a photo of my end ring compared to the Walthers end ring. One dumper for coal cars, one for wood chip cars.
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