General Discussion (Garden Railways)

I just purchased 12 locomotives, I am goin to try to build a ore and coal hauling railroad. It will be about 600 feet long and 260 feet wide. This is my first attempt at outdoor railroading so the learning curve will be steep. I would like to ask if anybody makes operating [self dumping] ore or coal cars, I have tried to research this and have found nothing. I figured some of you gentlemen been doing the Garden Railroading quite a while  and might know. Thanks for any information given.

Harold

I believe Bob Grosh did this, you might try to contact him. I think he used solenoids, and powered them from the track, he runs DCC.

 http://the-ally.blogspot.com/

Regards, Greg

First Next where do you live? Area would work. That sounds like a very large space to fill, I hope you have help and LOTS of free time. Not all of your Hopper cars would have to be converted a few would do the trick. GR had an artical a few years back on converting non-oper to manual operating balist cars.

Lot's of Luck with your new RR. BTY weeeeeeeee LIKE PICTURES

Dave

I live in Maryland, just outside of Baltimore. I will probably do most of the work myself, I just retired. I enjoy operating a railroad, never was big into very detailed building and landscaping. I just want to build a ore/coal hauling railroad, the sticky part is trying to design a loading facility that will load cars. It will mainly have BN motive power, all EMD [SD40-2 forever], never was very fond of GE power. If I ever learn how to will post pictures.

Harold 

Harold:  Posting pictures is very easy. Open a free account at www.photobucket.com or www.webshots.com or any of the other free storage sites.  They make their money with advertising that will be on your pages, most are inside normal boxes at top of the page or down the side.  Occasionally there will be a pop-up, but you learn to ignore it.  They also off good prices for printing your pictures.  You can cerate sub directories within your account to separate photo types.  Once they are on the site, they provide the “(bracket)img (bracket)xxxx(dot).xxxxx(dot)xxxxx(dot).xxx(bracket)/img(bracket)” location that you just copy and paste into your postings here.  Once you have done one picture, you will see that it is just as easy as looking at photos on your hard drive.

I substituted the phrase (bracket) for either the "[" or "]" symbol and the word "(dot)" for the ".". If I had not done the substutions the site would have tried to  place a picture here.