Most of the models we have of coal mines are single structures. I have this model, an N-scale one I picked up in eBay. I think it is an AHM, but I'm not sure.
Near as I can figure, A is the room that brings coal up the shaft and deposit it in B. In this room the slag and impurities are separated and the coal is sent to C where it is dropped into hoppers. I cannot imagine this operation filling more than 2 or 3 coal cars per hour due to the physical limitations if the size of the building. The slag is send down the chute to D where the lower grade coal is separated from the slag and it is dropped into one of the three E bays below. The slag is removed and the coal that can be sold is loaded into trucks or hoppers.
To me this seems to be an incomplete operation as there are no offices, rest rooms, equipment storage facilities, etc.
So the question are:
1) Am I right in my assumptions above?
2) What auxiliary structures would you expect to find in an operation this size?
3) Anything else needed to model the operation?
Chip
Building the Rock Ridge Railroad with the slowest construction crew west of the Pecos.
I would presume your letters are correct. A, B, C, D and E. Now here is a few tidbits.
You would want oil to spray onto the coal to keep dust down. Some mines did this and advertised it as such. Dustless coal etc.
The tipple loader GENERALLY had a pile of sorted coal to load into the hopper. USUALLY he had a chute to guide the coal into the hopper car. Most of the time the hopper car sat on a downgrade that is very gentle. There was a crewman on the ground that will have a iron bar and loosen the brake wheel of that hopper car to drift it as it is being loaded. Eventually that hopper car is drifted down to the loads outbound area.
Usually there are several more hoppers on that track BEHIND the tipple.
Mine trains came up in the morning, dropped the empties ready to be drifted under the tipples and departed with loads later in the day.
It would be a rather low output mine, but if you can find a bunch of mines along a branch .. say 4 of them suddenly that mine train is going to be groaning with coal coming back down.
Mine run coal had everything in it. Unsorted. Cheep.
Stoker coal I think were smaller pea sized coal.. probably sold for home coal heat/hot water units.
Baseball sized coal (Lump?) went to industry or shipping.
Other sizes got quite big but there I think was about 6 general differences in size with a specific family of end users for that size coal.
I don't think that's an American prototype and I am not convinced it is actually even a coal mine structure. The nifty clerestory ventilators are just the sort of thing that coal mines in the U.S., especially small impecunious mines, would never purchase. The brick and stone base structure is also highly suspect; coal mines in the U.S. of small size were impermanent operations that had no spare cash for fixed plant of anything but the slipshoddiest construction.
As you point out it's highly incomplete, if indeed it's a coal mine structure.
Coal would MOST likely enter this structure through an elevated trestle (not shown) at floor level of B. That trestle would lead from either a portal into an adjacent hillside or from a headhouse from a shaft. The floor space in B is very small and only for miniscule quantities of coal would there be room for crushing or sorting -- really, all you can accomplish here is dump the car into a chute into a hopper or gon underneath. As for filling 2-3 cars an hour: it would be more like 2-3 cars per day in a mine this small if it's dumping mine cars. You could stick a conveyor belt in there and get better throughput, maybe 8 cars a day if you had a car puller to keep moving the cars forward. Or get a medium-sized Cat, Michigan or IH wheel loader, and after first using it to knock over this collection of sticks and shoving it into the nearest gully, use the space to load the hoppers directly.
The bays in E are so narrow you could hardly get anything bigger than a donkey-drawn 2-wheel cart into them. More likely that lump coal was dumped into them (3 bays, 3 sizes) and shoveled by hand into a wagon, cart, or pickup truck parked outside. Dropping lump coal is a really good way to turn it into slack coal, thereby destroying its value, so I'm dubious that this is really the purpose of the bays (again, not sure this is actually a coal mine!).
Coal picking (to size and clean coal) was entirely a hand operation until the 1920s even at very large mines. As labor costs grew and child labor laws and immigration restrictions cut out the lowest cost labor coal mines began mechanising to clean, crush, and size coal. These tend to be very big installations in order to achieve economy of scale, and there's hardly enough room in D to do anything but stick a small jaw crusher in there.
Slag is a byproduct of fusing (melting) rock to recover a desirable metal, or melting a metal in order to cast it. The impurities in coal that can be removed by hand or machine are rock, bone (carbonized rock), and tramp iron. Coal washing machinery can do all that plus reduce sulfur and ash content.
RWM
I have the same model. I have been using it for years as a coal/ore station of sort. I inherited it from my dad when he went HO years ago. He built it originally in the late 60's or early 70's. It's a solid little structure with some nice detail.
Rich
Chip, depending on the era, here are some of the other structures that you would find.
1. power plant. Many mines burned coal to generate electricity and steam for the mine and the surrounding mine community. Frequently with a good size chimney.
2. Miners shed where the would shower and dress into their below ground clothing. These were often 2 stories high with open vents in the sides of the top story. The workers would pull their gear up on cables for drying and security, padlocking the cable suspending the clothing up high.
3. Mule shed, still for mules or other storage.
4. Offices and miscellaneous sheds for activities like blacksmith or maintenance activities.
5. Ventilation shafts (often a significant distance form the main mine head. Usually also acted as a secondary escape route from below ground. They might even have a structure housing huge ventilation fans.
6. If it is a shaft mine they would have a mine head super structure as well.
This is all based on research I did into the construction of a mine scene modelling a specific Illinois shaft mine at start of the 20th century.
Simon Modelling CB&Q and Wabash See my slowly evolving layout on my picturetrail site http://www.picturetrail.com/simontrains and our videos at http://www.youtube.com/user/MrCrispybake?feature=mhum
I am curious what you find out about that kit. I have this one as well. I believe mine is from the late seventies or early eighties. I'm guessing this is one of those models that looks neat, but doesn't accurately depict an actual industry. Kind of like the old brewery that everyone seems to have. How many breweries have you seen that were that small? I hope someone has more information on this kit. If it isn't a form of coal mine, what else could you use this for?
BlueHillsCPR wrote:Are we talking about current mines or mines from a pre-deisel era? All of the coal mining around here today and for the past several years at least is open pit mining.
Underground mining is indeed still going on for coal in the Appalachian region. Also, some underground zinc mines are now reopening.
If your really want to "uglify" your layout, try mountaintop mining--very controversial approach to retrieving coal.
Cute building but it's missing alot to be considered a coal mine
Take a look at these drawings to see what a real mine looks like
http://www.wva-usa.com/newsite/www.wvrailroads.com/drawings/kaymoor/
TerryinTexas
See my Web Site Here
http://conewriversubdivision.yolasite.com/
Chip,
I feel your pain. My small mine scene is obviously incomplete; I ended up kitbashing an N scale Walthers New River Mine following Jim Kelly's kitbash of the HO version in the April 2005(?) MR...
Two things hopefully help add credibility; I added a mine office (a Hay Brothers Garage Quonset hut) and a mine supervisor (the tall gentleman in the hardhat in front of the hut) and the chain-link fence. You don't see the start or end of that fence (it disappears into the trees), suggesting the mine property is bigger than it is, and that there are probably other support structures about.
But I'm keenly aware that I have no shower house, no power station, no dynamite shed, no heavy mining equipment, and that the stub-end track arrangement is pretty limited.
Compromises.
Modeling the Rio Grande Southern First District circa 1938-1946 in HOn3.
Kenfolk wrote:Underground mining is indeed still going on for coal in the Appalachian region. Also, some underground zinc mines are now reopening.
Cool!
Agreed. Pit mining, strip mining, hydro mining etc. are not very pretty and in some cases very harmful to the environment. Around here the pit is all we have. Not sure about other parts of Canada?
Dave Vollmer wrote:My small mine scene is obviously incomplete; I ended up kitbashing an N scale Walthers New River Mine following Jim Kelly's kitbash of the HO version in the April 2005(?) MR...
That's a nice scene all the same Dave.
Chip here are some images scanned from old postcards of the afore mentioned mine.
Here is all that is left today, basically the remains of the power plant and some ancillary buildings.
and finally my model of same based on the Walthers New River mine kit.
I agree with the other comments that this was originally a European model. I have a similar one in HO scale, except the tipple section (B and C) has more of a US look. On my model there are some rails cast into into the base of level D (above those three bays). Maybe these rails are the coal delivery method.
My thought is that the coal or ore comes in on small mine cars (maybe even human powered) and gets side-dumped into the structure on level D. The incline up to B is a hoist to move the coal to the tipple. The slack and maybe the slate could be dumped in the E bay.. (Must... resist..... bad.. pun...!!!)
There would need to be a power source of some kind to power the hoist, maybe a small boiler house that would send steam to an engine on Level D and pehaps another on level B to move the conveyors in the tipple. Would need to add some steam exhaust stacks.
Anyway, that's how I was going to make it work - run a trestle from the mine entrance to the rails on level D, use a few 1968 vintage HOn3 side dump mine cars I have, and plan on one or two cars/day from this mine.
George V
Here's a few photos of one i scratch built
as you can see the coal comes out of the shaft via small push hoppers and is dumped at the base of the conveyor it's then taken to the top of the tipple
where it goes thru shakers and screens to sort then dispensed into waiting hopper cars
There's an office/equipment building and a shed for the Jeffery Mine Motor
Still absent is a power supply house and a water retention pond
for water pumped out of the mine shafts
\
C&O fan very nice work,looks awesome.
I have seen that model sold as a sand and gravel mine as well.
Remember that their are at least 2 types of coal, bituminous and anthracite. Anthracite is also known as hard coal. Anthracite is mostly in Eastern Pennsylvania. The coal was brought out of the mine and then put through a "breaker" to get it broken up and seperated into the various sizes and cleaned of any contanimant (dirt). In the early part of the 20th century they paid young boys to pick through the coal to get any rocks and such out. Anthracite coal breakers were huge monsters. I believe there is a law that the breaker cannot be directly on the mine. Apparently they had some fires where the breaker caught fire and the miners were trapped. In many cases, the coal was brought to the breaker from several mines owned by the same company. Sometimes it was handled by the narrow gauge mine railroad and for mines further apart the full size railroad handled it. So a breaker could be a loads in/loads out operation. Also there should be a big pile of "tailings" basically the low grade stuff and junk they pick out.
Here is the Huber Breaker in Ashley, PA, no longer in use. They are trying to preserve it as a museum.
http://www.huberbreaker.org/photos/past/jscupski1.jpg
aav wrote: C&O , looks good, what materials did you use to construct it?
Thank You
It's built of Strip Wood the roofs are corrugated tin
the coal chutes are from a Walther's coaling tower which were unused
which can be raised or lowered using the bent wire hand cranks
the wood was stained dark mahogany
I built my own because I wanted a wood structure as many of the mines
in the area were built of wood in the 20s and 30s
Thanks everyone,
I have about 1 sq ft to work with , but I think That will be enough. Right now I am planning the tipple/sorting house you see, an office, and equipment shed, and a shower room, plus two track service in a diorama.
hello, my knowledge is highly restricted into what is coal mining, but tha layout is still in my head is based on one that my dad used to manage when i was a child; Canmore Mines, afterwards he became a mines inspector for the province of alberta and often took me on trips to see other mines across the province, when i go see him he's bound to have a lot of photos somewhere so maybe i'll post some.
The model while it is a an interesting smallish mine seems ok for beginning of the nineteenth century, so I can only do one thing:
I am also just asking
but when is your layout period?
Folks:
I don't know a whole lot about mining in particular, but I do want to make a comment about size. I'm not going to say "Size matters not", but when we consider these small mine tipples, small breweries, etc. we should remember that none of us have much space. My 4 x 8 is 6 acres. I could fill a quarter of it with my employer's modest factory. That wouldn't be much fun, but on top of that it would actually be less realistic than a compressed model. Why? It would fill the available "visible world", and that's not the impression a real factory gives.
Because of this, I would rather see a small model railroad equipped with half a dozen highly compressed industries, say 6" x 9", with some breathing room, than half a dozen Walthers-dreambook less-compressed structures of perhaps 9" x 12". The big blocks make the board look smaller.
The trick, then, was how to make these small structures look big enough, since they're rarely going to be big enough. This mine structure could be part of an acceptable-looking complex if some of the support structures and scene elements mentioned by others were added - culm banks, locker rooms, perhaps a dirt parking lot, et cetera. Most important is to keep these other elements in proportion to the small tipple, so the illusion can work properly.
Hello all,
Here are a few pictures of my friend's coal mine module (using Free-mo standards).
I hope you enjoy them. It looks better "in person" than the pictures show. If you have questions or comments, please post them.
Those look great, Tim!
I have heard of "coal washeries". I suppose if one had the room one could model this part of the operation as well, but perhaps just the mine proper, the basic structures, would have to suffice to get the "point" across for the vast majority of us.
Not a lot of room for a mine? Model a truck dump! Some of the truck dumps include several small building/structures, but don't gobble the room of a mine tipple.
Nice thing about the modern age, you don't have to model the mine, just the flood loader...often a couple miles away from the mine connected by conveyors. Relatively straightforward structure, takes up very little space...works well on a single spur.
Autobus and Shawnee are right, you don't need huge spaces to model coal loading ops. Eastern Kentucky is riddled with smaller loaders, past and present. What i understand there aren't many tipples used today but truck dumps are still pretty frequent. Often, a branchline would serve many mines but couldn't build an individual track to each and every mine hence the coal would be transported by truck,conveyer,etc. to the loader on the branch. Sometimes the mines could be a couple miles away from the loader.
I've seen countless pictures of small to medium type loaders , from crude basic operations to smaller tipple type operations. These loaders didn't have all sorts of support buildings to go along with them like you see with the larger plant types. Truck dumps can put out 1 to 30 cars a day, so a few of these could start wielding some pretty good traffic on a smaller layout.
There are a million different designs of loaders ,as they were built to accomodate the situation. I've seen some that might be "similar" but never the same. I think these make for some interesting kitbashing and scratchbuilding projects .
Kenfolk wrote: If your really want to "uglify" your layout, try mountaintop mining--very controversial approach to retrieving coal.
I'd have to disagree,the company I work for spends millions every year on reclamation.