Hey guys I am wanting to build a module with a cement plant on it. I want the Walthers Valley Cement kit 933-3098 but as you may know it is retired. Do any of you know where I could find this kit for a reasonable price? I know E-bay is one source but that is hit and miss for the price. One guy has the kit listed for $700 plus shipping
I want to try to aquire this kit for around $100 for NIB, if any of you have an idea please let me know.
Also there are other cement kits from Walthers that I would not mind either that are also retired. I have Medusa Cement so please do not suggest that one, I want the whole plant not just the silos
Oh and this is in HO scale.
Thanks
Massey
A Veteran, whether active duty, retired, national guard, or reserve, is someone who, at one point in his or her life, wrote a blank check made payable to "The United States of America" for an amount of "up to and including my life."
Have you tried the Yahoo group HOYardSale. You might find one that someone is willing to sell. I would also like this kit. Maybe Walthers will release it again.
Will
Have you thought about combining the Medusa Cement co.kit with say Ashland iron and steel kit and Glacier gravel company kit to create a massive kit bash cement works. I mean you may have to scratch build some gear but hay its all part of the fun.
Cheers...
Chris from down under...
We're all here because we're not all there...
MonkeyBucket Have you thought about combining the Medusa Cement co.kit with say Ashland iron and steel kit and Glacier gravel company kit to create a massive kit bash cement works. I mean you may have to scratch build some gear but hay its all part of the fun.
I have the Medusa Cement and I have already assembled it. I was thinking about doing something similar to your suggestion if I am unable to acquire the kit. I have been trying to find pictures online of Cement plants but most of the time I only get a small section and that is it. I need to install google Earth and try that way.
MRR had an awesome plant article in its May1998 edition. It was a scratch build of Consolidated Concrete, almost 7 feet long in HO. Twas very impressive.
I'm also looking to build a credible cement plant. Just ordered the May of 98 issue.
Curious if you've seen this:
http://www.theinsidegateway.com/Default%20Cement%20Plants.htm
Granted, it appears to use two of the Valley Cement kits, but it may provide and idea as to other kits that could be kitbashed to work.
~ Jason
I have only run my eyes over it once but soon to see this up on their pages it seems.
Cornerstone Series(R) Valley Cement (Plastic Kit)
Walthers Part # 933-3098 HO scale, $79.98, not currently in stock at Walthers, Expected: 28-Jun-2012
From Google Maps - West Sacramento California - located on South River Road south of I-80 Freeway
Cement1 by Donald Schmitt, on Flickr
Cement4 by Donald Schmitt, on Flickr
Cement3 by Donald Schmitt, on Flickr
Cement2 by Donald Schmitt, on Flickr
I plan to make an N scale model using using the HO scale Medusa Cement kit.
I tried to sell my two cents worth, but no one would give me a plug nickel for it.
I don't have a leg to stand on.
This supplier seems to have something (lime maybe) fed via the river. There is a pile and fender setup inline with the jetty.
This would be easy to recreate as a hopper fed site with the kit you mentioned. Looks to be a waste area next door. Lots of activity here.
Gidday, the article in the May 1998 Model Railroader, while a very good one, is actually on a concrete batching plant (ready mix), not a cement plant.
For cement plants; Model Railroader July 1963, "Some times you need a shoehorn" by Robert F Cushman describes, amongst other things, scale compressing the Cayuga Lake Cement Plant.
In the April 1995 Model Railroader, Walt Niehoff wrote an article "Kitbashing a Cement Company in HO scale" based on Robert F Cushmans article.
In the July 1994 Model Railroader, Ken Nelson wrote an article "Add a cement plant to your layout".
There is also a good section on cement in "the Model Rairoader's Guide to Industries along the tracks 3" by Jeff Wilson.
Railmodel Journal, February 1995, "Cement Plant Operations for Modellers: The Northwestern Portland Cement Co" by Ron Ferrel.
Railmodel Journal, May 1992, "The Portland Cement Co at Glenn Falls New York, Part 1", Part 2 in May 1993.
I am sure this is just scratching the surface of available information, if Walthers is actually going to re-release Valley Cement it could solve a lot of problems.
Cheers, the Bear.
"One difference between pessimists and optimists is that while pessimists are more often right, optimists have far more fun."
Ah yes... The "Madusa kit" being the batching plant.
Thanks for all the extra literature. I may have to get into the club library for those mags as I was subscribed to Australian model railways mag back then. All my Aussie gear has been since traded for SP rolling stock and locos.
Cheers
In the past, I have done business with Advanced Model Railroad. They seem to have an inventory of discontinued stock. I checked their website and they appear to have one in stock.
http://www.advancedmodelrailroad.com/servlet/the-5010/HO-SCALE--dsh-VALLEY-CEMENT/Detail
Marlon
See pictures of the Clinton-Golden Valley RR
MonkeyBucket
The Medusa kit is simply a cement distribution facility. No production takes place there. There are small concrete ready mix plants in many small towns that receive all of their cement via truck. The Medusa facility takes cement from the hopper shed and conveys them to the top of the silos where they are stored. Trucks use the doors in the silos (which is a part of the Medusa kit) to load the cement by gravity, then take them to the small ready mix plants in the area. No cement is produced with the Medusa kit.
Since this is the way I assume the kit would function in the real world, I'm not sure that the Medusa kit is appropriate for use in a cement production facility.
- Douglas
I found one late last year at my LHS and I modified my some to fit in my space, leaving off the tumbler pipe thing and also mixed in the Black Gold asphalt plant with it. Since these photos were taken I have ballasted and added in heavy equipment and piles of gravel and sand.
I kitbashed a cement plant using various parts of several kits, including Walthers Medusa Cement, ADM elevator, New River mine and coal flood loader, plus components from a couple IHC and Heljan kits I had sitting around along wih some detail parts.
If you can get creative, the availability of a specific kit isn't necessarily a big deal.
Rob Spangler
DoughlessIf it is to load the hopper cars that are parked in the shed, how does it do that? There is no chute.
It's not a perfect representation since it is based on the existing kit, but the idea is that the loading chute is inside the shed the hoppers pass through. Building a larger/taller shed would help with the effect, as would some external piping.
Layout Design GalleryLayout Design Special Interest Group
MonkeyBucket This supplier seems to have something (lime maybe) fed via the river. There is a pile and fender setup inline with the jetty. This would be easy to recreate as a hopper fed site with the kit you mentioned. Looks to be a waste area next door. Lots of activity here.
The facility in West Sacramento has been closed for several years. When in operation there were dozens of hoppers delivering cement. Dock was for barges. Don't know the purpose. Could have been to bring in raw materials as you suggest or to ship product to other sites along the river. I believe it had not been used for masny years even when the plant was in operatiom.
cuyama Doughless: If it is to load the hopper cars that are parked in the shed, how does it do that? There is no chute. It's not a perfect representation since it is based on the existing kit, but the idea is that the loading chute is inside the shed the hoppers pass through. Building a larger/taller shed would help with the effect, as would some external piping.
Doughless: If it is to load the hopper cars that are parked in the shed, how does it do that? There is no chute.
Thanks Byron,
Good points. At least a taller shed would help give that illusion. Fairly simply done with corrugated sheet styrene and using the portal ends as templates. Some spare sprues for piping perhaps.
My only reason for bringing up my somewhat anal observation was the prices that sellers are asking on the secondary market. I was in a LHS about 2009 where there was a Valley Cement kit on the shelf at the original MSRP of $55. I had no use for it at the time but was this close to buying it anyway. At MSRP, I can overlook the small omissions compared to what some secondary market sellers are asking.
Perhaps Walthers will put some effort into making the loading shed area a bit more realistic if they re-release the kit.
You might take a look at the Walthers grain elevator chutes / elevators or just make something from Evergreen or Plastruct tube for the loading tubing
I made this kit for the layout at Boothbay RR Village a few years ago, and had a number of issues with the "operability" of the kit.
The most important was the lack of rail delivery to the Aggreagte Building; the heavily reinforced concrete building on the left in MonkeyBucket's post. I took the shed and lift conveyor (shortened) from the silos, and added it to the side of the aggregete building for rail delivery of aggregate that that does not come from the limestone quarry. I then made an opening in the bottom of the silos for track to go through the bottom of one side of the silo. This works to some extent, but clearances are tight, and only older style, small cement hoppers will fit through the opening. Plate C cars are a definite no go. If I was to do this again, I would keep the shed on the silo, make a delivery system from tubing, and scratch build a delivery shed on the aggregate building from Evergreen courrogated styrene sheet.
Another problem is there is no fuel supply or storage for the kiln; we got a Walthers fuel tank 933-3167 and assumed that the kiln uses #6 fuel oil. A more appropriate fuel would be coal, maybe something like Walthers Blue Coal (discontinued kit) would work for this.
The Valley Cement kit recommends adding a bagging plant using Golden Valley Canning, now retired and replaced by Imperial Foods 933-2852, a built-up kit. The platforms for Golden Valley Canning are molded as wood which seemed rather weak to me for a heavy product like cement. I scratch-built concrete loading docks for rail and truck shipping from styrene sheet.http://www.walthers.com/exec/productinfo/933-3018I also scratch built an enclosed conveyor from the silos to the bagging building
We did get the motorizing kit for the rotary kiln, but stopped using it. It is noisy and and slips out of alignment. The kiln turns so slowly, you can hardly see it move - like with a prototype kiln
Also, for a large plant like this, I built a front office building from DPM modular parts and an a maintenence shop from another DPM kit (don't remember which one)
BTW, Dragon Products is a real cement plant located in Thomaston, ME
Here are some photos from the museum layout; some were taken during the construction:
Overall view
Aggregate and Bagging Buildings
Silos, end of kiln Building and main gate
Office and Maint Buildings
Fuel tank and back of aggreagte building
Bagging plant
Silo and bagging plant - note the conveyor between the two
Sheepscott Scale Products makes a Bulk Cement Trailer that came out last yearhttp://www.sheepscotscale.com/site/2011/01/22/bulk-cement-trailer
George In Midcoast Maine, 'bout halfway up the Rockland branch
That looks really good. The plant I rememebr from my childhood had a door for trucks to load under the silos but railcars were loaded via a tube conveyor. It sat ont he side of a hill and tracks came in on two levels, the upper level led on to an open trestle to dump coal and other materials.
You arrangment looks about the size of the space I have to work with - any idea what the overall dimensions there are? I may have to steal that arrangments of the parts, even though it's not exactly how the plant I a atempting to model was arranged. I don;t have the room to build it the exact same way, it was far too long, with the kiln and silos in a row witht eh baghouse to the left, and the office was in the far back about midway between the silos and baghouse. Almost a mirror image of what you have there. Mine will be on a penninsula, and the front of the office would face the end of the pennisula, with the tracks leading on to the layout at the root of the pennisula.
--Randy
Modeling the Reading Railroad in the 1950's
Visit my web site at www.readingeastpenn.com for construction updates, DCC Info, and more.
Acording to walthers website it's expected in June go to search type in valley cement and check the out of stock box before hitting search botton
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Good observation, as it stands without the lime the property is really a mixing site. sand, gravel and lime mixed together, stored as dry product. Mixed as needed appears that it is probably mixed in the cement trucks on the way to the construction. The silo's are for dry storage.
What surprised me with the Walthers kit shown is that it contained the caustic section where the limestone is put throught the giant kilm (roaster) and made into a caustic lime on site.
You would expect to find this process at the large cement plants as it uses the basic products only and the caustic lime is an expensive additive in making concrete.
The plant pictured in the photos of the protype isn't a cememnt mill that makes cement from raw materials, that's where the disconnect is comign in. Valley Cement is a model fo a full fledged plant that takes raw materials and makes cement. The pictures prototype is more like the OTHER Walter's kit, Medusa Cement - a cement distributor. The only thing they take in there is the output of a plant like Valley Cement and then distribute it in smaller batches such as via truck to batch plants that actually make concrete out of it. Witht hat dock in the river, it wouldn;t surprise me if the cement came in via barge, then was offloaded into the silos for final transportation via truck.
AN actual cement plant needs a LOT of ground to model it all. Valley Cememnt is compressed, a LOT. One thing that sort of saves you is that many plants like that had a conveyor or trucked the limestone in from a quarry not immediately on the plant site. One near me had an aerial tramway - cable cars - to move the limestone fromt he quarry over land and across a highway to the actual plant. Works for models - you cna put the wuarry on the backdrop or say it's over the hills and out of sight and not be wrong. Now, the one I'm modeling, the quarry was right on site - well, it's getting left out because I'd need my entire room to model just the cement plant to anything approaching scale. Looking at photos, on the back side of the silos (of which there were SIXTEEN - larger in diameter AND taller than the ones in Valley Cement) were 4 tracks for covered hoppers. On the other side, betwee the silos and back plant, were at least 6 tracks for boxcars to load bagged product. In scale terms, the kiln in Valley Cement is less than half actual size, and definitely narrowr in diameter - one of my books shows a 30's automobile driving through the kiln as a publicity stunt, so if the kiln tube were scale, an HO scale auto would fit inside it.
The good news is, a cement plant isn't a steel mill. Even if you fill a basement with JUST a steel mill - it's still too small to be full size.
G Paine
George, thanks for the post and the pictures. I remember reading about your efforts in another thread a while back. I like the plant, and the bagging building is a great match.
Over here in the upside down land of Australia some uni students have developed a use for fly ash (the byproduct of burning coal). With our new cleaner coal burning power plants in Western Australia the technology now allows us to catch the ash with shakers and stockpile it. Guess what the student have been able to do with it. They have designed a high grade of cement incorperating the ash that is not only as good but may even be stronger than your usual burnt chalk and lime mixes.
With this in mind I would be thinking that some of our South Western power stations such as Bluewater Power Station and its sister would diversify their industry and compliment the business with a cement technologies plant. Unfortunately, all the coal is delivered by conveyers up to 9 km long so modeling a railway on it would not be prototypical, but opportunity to model a coal mine that supplies a power station that supplies a cement technologies plant are now quite real.
Now changing the subject. I agree that the Valley Cement plant silos should be complimented with the elevator and roof details from Red X cement. The rest of the model seems to be flowing toward a dispatch (bagging plant and/or truck and railway hopper loading) areas for supply to batching plants elsewhere. The Plant in the above pictures seems to be running in reverse. On my version of the model, the lower concrete walled building would be the load out. This is usually done with the use of front end loaders. One of the sheds I used to maintain in Kwinana bulk terminal had a lean to section down the side where the clinker (cement product) would be loaded onto semi trailers and into hoppers which alternatively supply a flood loader system further away from the shed.
This model would incorporate another cement batching kit to create the flood loader having a run through for trucks and a load out for rail. There would have to be an operations office attached to this.
MonkeyBucket Thanks for all the extra literature. I may have to get into the club library for those mags as I was subscribed to Australian model railways mag back then. All my Aussie gear has been since traded for SP rolling stock and locos. Cheers
Gidday, sorry, not thinking last night.
http://www.trainlife.com/
http://www.trainlife.com/magazines/pages/438/31958/february-1995-page-4
http://www.trainlife.com/magazines/pages/93/6671/may-1992-page-17
http://www.trainlife.com/magazines/pages/147/10620/may-1993-page-6
Thanks to all who posted their photos, good to see how you have modelled a cement plant.
Scale compression is what I'm currently wrestling with, I want a plant that looks that it is the "right" size to generate the required amount of traffic, the kiln building at North American Cement described in Ken Nelsons, July 1994 Model Railroader, article would have an HO foot print of 4' 8" x 14" on its own. Oh well things to exercise the mind.
Cheers,the Bear.
Looks like the old days (1930s) of delivering the goodies to make our grey stuff was done with these bad boyz...
Thanks for the link to these online resources.
A couple of these didn't go astray for the finer stuff...
This is a Google link to the Dragon Products cement plant in Thomaston, Maine. The limestone quarry is across the road (US Rte 1) from the plant on the north side. This is a large plant that makes Portland cement and agricutural lime. They ship out by rail and truck. Rail usually goes to nearby Rockland where it is loaded into barges. They can also ship to a connection in Brunswick with Pan Am RR (ex-Guilford, ex-MEC). The local RR is Maine Eastern RR
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=Thomaston,+ME&hl=en&ll=44.084102,-69.157605&spn=0.007229,0.013711&oq=thomaston&t=h&hnear=Thomaston,+Knox,+Maine&z=16
rrinker You arrangment looks about the size of the space I have to work with - any idea what the overall dimensions there are?. --Randy
Randy, today was our work day at the museum, so I measured the cement plant. It is about 41-1/2" long by 19" wide. This is just the Walthers Valley Cement part of the project, and does not include the additional buildings.
Some additional & more recent photos are on the museum website:http://www.railwayvillage.org/Cement_Plant.htm
Massey:
I spent 27 years in the Portland Cement industry and, working in a corporate design/build/start up team, have personally designed and supervised the erection of both wet and dry process cement plants. Which of the two processes would best fit your layout? It would depend on the region and era you are modeling as well as the old "available space" bugaboo.
The Walthers model (pictured) appears to be a pared down version of an older dry process plant (no open topped slurry basins that would be found in a wet process plant) such as would have existed prior to creation of the Environmental Protection Agency. It also suggests a northern clime due to so much enclosure.
When Corporate Chief Engineer of my long time Dallas employer, my engineers and draftsmen actually scratch built three dimensional models of two new cement mills. Accurate right down to actual tree locations on the plant sites, they were used for pre-bid conferences and community relations at Artesia, Mississippi and New Braunfels, Texas respectively. Though constructed on a one foot contour interval at a scale of 0.100" per foot, we used HO flex track that looked fine. Both models were totally voluntarily built "after hours" and our CEO treated us right by individual recognition at the annual stockholder's meeting and special monetary favor disproportionate to pay grade. None of us were then active model railroaders, but most had some limited modeling experience. They were impressive, both men and models.
If it would help, I would be glad to assist you in putting together a plan that would be prototypically accurate, but with practical considerations of scratch building within available space. My suggestion would be to consider building the model at 1/8" per foot, rather than the true HO scale of 3.5 mm.
Not many modelers know the difference between a Cement Terminal and a Cement Plant, much less want to build the more involved plant. Let me know if I can help.