i just hacked a gravel mine kit with a kato turnout switch. it can pour the gravel in but how do i drop it off. any ideas. also i found silica sand to pour very well, but anything that would pour better would be nice.
How good are your animation skills?
Are you using hoppers with opening and closing bottom doors (or can you make them operational, hopefully more realistic working than the Tyco stuff of yore) - if so, consider a concrete gravel pit under the rails - ostensibly to feed a conveyor running out of the pit, but in reality feeding a bucket or bowl underneath.
Else, if the hopper bottom is molded solid, or you’re modeling Gondolas (which are supposed to have solid bottoms in the first place), your stuck running into a corrugated shed or other enclosed area, and pretending via the old “Loads In/Empties Out” operation paradigm, as I don’t think rotary dumps are used all that much for railroad gravel unloading (I have seen images of backhoes, on earth or concrete ramps gaining them elevation to unload Gondolas/Hoppers from the top (backhoe on the side of the Gondola, not on the top) - but again, how good are your animation skills?
I have a string of those old Tyco/Mantua “clamshell” hoppers. I load them here, at a Vollmer structure I’ve had since I was a teenager.
The loader has a pair of chutes with solenoid-operated doors. After fifty years, they still work. The cars get unloaded over on the other side of the layout.
You can see the operating silver-colored clamshell doors beneath the car. They open when they cross the special actuator over the bin. It’s a purely mechanical thing. I’ve since painted the doors black to make them less obvious. Beneath the track, I built up a “volcano” of Woodland Scenics Cinders ballast, which I use for coal. The volcano’s crater is an opening to a box below the layout which catches the coal and allows me to move it back to the loader for another trip.
The Tyco operating hopper may well have been the best all-around operating HP hopper car, but here’s a couple more:
http://www.hoseeker.net/revellinformation/Revell1959infopage12.jpg
The above link shows the Revell car up towards the top. It had a couple of arms that stuck out low and to the side. When the car was shoved up the ramp to the dump spot, a ramp/groove in the “wooden railings” of the base would pull the arms down–the arms being connected to the bottom doors. Hence, dumping. I think it would work as a pull-through dumper if you made your own–the supplied one was a stub only.
Also:
http://www.hoseeker.net/Ulrich/ulrickflier7.jpg
This is the Ulrich, the Cadillac of operating HO hoppers (the triple, not the twin). It not only looked quite nice, but the operating mechanism was almost totally concealed. BUT, it only worked in a stub-in operation–you couldn’t do a pull through.
I don’t know to what extent any of these cars leaked. I do have an Ulrich around somewhere. I hope to dig it out someday and re-build it. It was my first all-metal car (has a bit of heft, I’ll tell ya), and I really loved it.
Ed
My loose `coal’ goes into non-operating hoppers, or into drop-side gons whose sides don’t drop. My solution is to route them to the cassette dock in the netherworld, then shove the loads into a special cassette where they get tipped about 150 degrees. After the empty cars are pulled and parked in normal staging I up-end the cassette over a modified watering can which is used to return the coal to the colliery for the next cycle.
I also have an empties in/loads out arrangement at the same colliery. The exchange involves a trip into the netherworld on a train elevator.
Incidentally, there are such things as drop-bottom gons, but the JNR and TTT don’t roster any.
Chuck (Modeling Central Japan in September, 1964)
sounds like a good plan. i am using N scale, i may have forgot to mention. some of that HO stuff looks cool although.