Walther's Ore Dock

[wjstix]

Is your layout set before 1930?? If not, why not just use a rotary dumper for the coal??

http://www.walthers.com/exec/productinfo/933-3903

BTW the Walthers ore dock kit is for a steel ore dock, not wood...but I imagine it wouldn't be that hard to alter it to look like a wood one.  

[HHPATH56]

I replaced a roundhouse, turntable, and town with a compressed Ashland Iron& Steel Mill, next to a harbor with ore bosat and two Hulett unloaders. The Hulett unloaders can be animated with levers and rubber band tension retrievers. On other parts of the layout I have a river with ore boat being loaded the a Walther's Ore dock. IN addition to the compressed Ashland Iron&Steel Mill Blast furnace, Blower, and Rolling Mill, I have a Coke and coal gas complex, and a limestone quarry, which are all rail intensive for iron production. How high is the flat part of the ore loader above the track level. With a 6ft.(72inch lead), my flat part of the ore loader is only 3 inches above the rest of the railroad, so the grade over 72inches = 4% grade. Since the small loco only pushes 4-6 cars at a time up the grade, one can get away with a 4% grade.

[cuyama]

Walter McWilliams

Thanks Byron,  could you give me an example of how this is accomplished?

Something like this very crude rendering

Edit: And actually, that should probably be labeled: "water" at lower elevation than "land" to make it clearer what is going on.

In other words, the track starts at the nominal elevation for that part of the layout, but the water surface is dropped lower. Easy with many benchwork and subroadbed techniques.

[Walter McWilliams]

Thanks Byron,  could you give me an example of how this is accomplished?

[Walter McWilliams]

I am using it to simulate the PRR anchor line dock at Erie, I am not an exact prototype modeler, and the walther's kit is the closest thing on the market I have found readily available.  About 1930 the dock installed a rotary dumper but prior to that they had an all wooden dock similar to the kit.  I am not a scratch builder so I have to use what is readily available.  On my railroad coal will come north to be loaded at the dock (an amalgamation of the PRR PA/OH great lake docks) and iron goes south to the steel plants near New Castle.

[cuyama]

chutton01

Huletts were ore unloaders, from ship to railcar; Ore docks, by very definition, are from railcar to ship.

Good point, I missed the mention of Huletts in the original post. If one were building a large layout with Duluth in one portion and Cleveland in another, then it might make sense to have both an iron ore dock and Huletts.

[chutton01]

I know there's "a prototype for everything", but does this make much sense?

Huletts were ore unloaders, from ship to railcar; Ore docks, by very definition, are from railcar to ship.
Thus, you have at the same port  huge amounts of infrastructure dedicated to both ore unloading and ore loading, which doesn't seem logical.  Could your model ore dock be repurposed as a coal dock? Did Huletts handle anything besides variations of Great Lakes iron ore? 
Otherwise your port's operations can be summed up as "lets ship some iron ore in, and send it out by rail; OK, now lets transport some iron ore in by rail, and send it off by ship?"  Coals to Newcastle, indeed.

Note, wiki states that " Another set [Hulett unloader] was used unloading barges of coal in South Chicago until 2002 " - so I guess that could work.  Also, apparently one Hulett was used to unload garbage in New York - that looks interesting, gotta be some images on the web of that.

[cuyama]

I'm just working on a layout design incorporating something similar to this kit. The water surface would be lower than the land elevation in real life. We can exaggerate this somewhat in the model. So if you are using a benchwork and subroadbed technique that allows the water surface to drop down significantly, you won't need to climb nearly so high.

Byron

[Comrad_Durandal]

To get from/to 10" of elevation with a 4% grade, you'd need 250 inches of run (roughly 20.83 feet).

[Walter McWilliams]

I am planning on building this when I finish my Hulett, and integrating them both into a dock scene.  My question is.  At 10" high, how long does the run need to be to have a 4% grade?  I really like the look this would add, but I dont want to spend all my lay out space building the run up.

 

Thanks

Mac