http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=du-n0E3i648
Look at the video above to see real narrow gauging in the rough at a little ~2 foot gauge coal mining road in Taiwan. Wow! Stub switches with a single throw rail thrown always by foot and track work that makes one wonder how it functions at all. Mostly women rail workers. Some cable pulls and some small gas shunting locos that demand a team of about 8 women to help a small string of empties upgarde.
Women in "Coolie" hats helping push the string hear a highway are nearly hit by passing cars.
Dumping mine tailings into a large ravine sliding into a muddy river. No EPA hear. Tailings are dumped by turning over the rock filled rail cars and mucking out all that doesn't dump out on its own and then righting the cars in a long practiced operation that makes it look easy. Again.... Wow!
This was a fascinating little operation! Anyone have the verve needed to model this short line?
And some of us laugh at how poorly maintained some of our own narrow gauge roads used to operate in their heyday.
Richard
If I can't fix it, I can fix it so it can't be fixed
Howdy, Richard,
Back in 1959 I "minefanned" several operations with similar track standards near Fukuoka, Japan. The one I intend to try to reproduce was worked by three couples and a dog. The men did the underground work and ran the 500mm gauge 'critter' (loads downgrade, empties up.) The women (in blue pajamas and bamboo hats) ran the crusher-sorter and did the rest of the surface work. The dog greeted visitors by planting his paws on their chests and licking their faces - he was covered with coal dust, and, shortly, so was I.
They were working around the edges of a deposit that was no longer profitable for a full-size, several trains a day, commercial operation. I suspect they dumped their waste rock underground, in that older mine's worked-out spaces.
Funniest trackwork I've encountered was a swing-point turnout on a tight curve. The point had the same curvature as the outer rail of the basic curve, and the stock rail of the diverging route was bumped out to match. It was traversed by one mini-car (box on wheels) at a time, powered by a hard-hat miner. That mine was about a kilometer from the rails and delivered coal by overhead cableway to a set of bins at the station.
Chuck (Modeling Central Japan in September, 1964 - with collieries seen in Kyushu in 1959)
Why should that be difficult. Much of my structure looks like that.
The Route of the Broadway Lion The Largest Subway Layout in North Dakota.
Here there be cats. LIONS with CAMERAS