Coal Industry (steam era)

[Anonymous]

I'm Relatively new the the game, and I'm interested in modeling the Coal Industry in HO. Does any one have any idea on were to find info on this, maybe some track plans and such. My area to work with is roughly 24"x10 and 48"x15' in an L shape.

[orsonroy]

That's a VERY broad question. What railroad are you interested in? What region of the country? Which PART of the steam era?

I could go on and on about the giant levels of coal production in central and south Illinois, handled by the C&IM, IC, CB&Q and C&NW (hint: it was at LEAST as large as the West Virginia coal industry), but I don't think that's quite what you're interested in!

[Anonymous]

Ryan01_1 - if your interest is in the Appalachian region take a look at the following website. Lots of photos of Appalachian coal hauler models, and for you, lots of track plans done by the site's owner, Dan Bourque, largely based on prototypes. A great site, it was named one of the ten best in MR.

http://appalachianrailroadmodeling.com/

Not quite sure about your available space. For HO, you might want to look at a switching type layout representing a coal branch with perhaps a small coal marshalling yard and a couple of coal mines.

A. P. Robinson

[cacole]

The part of southern Illinois where I was raised had open pit strip mines, so you'd need a 100 foot square layout to model one of those. There were, of course, smaller independent shaft mines with nothing above ground but a simple hoist.

When I was young and innocent, we used to feel the ground shake and hear a rumbling under our house when the #5 mine was blasting, because their tunnels ran all over the area.