automatic dumping hopper car?

[Anonymous]

I want to make a operational coal layout in ho scale?What I would like to know is do they make a hopper car that really does dump the coal.I am having trouble finding anything on the internet that sell a hopper car that dumps the load that they have.Can you make one?Does Model Railroader Mag. have an article on how to make one if so what year and what month would it be in.I bought the book ho railroad from start to finishit has in it a automatic dumping hopper car.It looks like the car is pushed up to a bumper and that trips a spring that opens the hopper doors but that is as far as they go.Please help.If you could show a website or some info on the internet I would love it

Thanks Barent

[CFournier]

I have a Concor kit of a coal or gravel dump on a small trestle, the kit includes a hopper with operating doors under the floor ( what are they called in english??). I gess Concor must sell these hoppers separately... By the way, there is a book on modeling a small layout ( I will come back with the title later...) that shows a way to improve on the operation of the hopper's doors, by modifying the spring in the mecanism.
Chris

[Anonymous]

yeah. con-cor still makes an opperating hopper car. i really dont know much about it because i have never seen one. I also have some old Ulrich tripperl hoppers that were opperating. they are nice cars as they are all metal and have secnet detail. Ulrich ones pop up on ebay often enough, and the con-cor ones im sure you could find at a hobbie shop or where ever else trains are sold.

[MisterBeasley]

I have 10 Mantua cars from the 60's. They have hopper doors that are gravity-weighted to stay close, but swing open when they pass over a special plastic piece in the the track. Back then, I was a teenager and I used horn-hook couplers. Unfortunately, the uncoupler blocks for those couplers back then were similar to to the hopper blocks, so I had to use a special solenoid-activated lifting uncoupler on the main line, and I couldn't put those cars on a siding if they were full. I'm just starting to put these things back together now.

By the way, they were a pain to clean up when they derailed while full. What I ended up doing to pick up spilled coal loads was to take the end off of the vacuum cleaner hose and cover the opening with a handkerchief. Then I could vacuum up small batches of the coal, trapping the coal in the cloth. It took a few cycles of emptying this small bag, and I had to clean out bits of scenery that came up with the coal, but all in all it was faster than picking up the coal by hand. These days, of course, you'd have to file a report with the Environmental Protection Agency.