I recently bought the red mtn mine from a hobby store for $10. The kit is complete with the exception of the instructions. It has the layout page, from which I have figured all the pieces with only a small aneurism, and I think I have gotten a great deal. I want to stay away from the generic empty shell tho and place a little detail into it and leaving doors open. I would like to know what each of the areas of the building contained so I can model it accordingly.
I’m taking a stab that the largest of the stacks is a boiler, the tallest part of the building being the hoist, … but what else? If you look close (sorry about the size), there is a set of tracks which exit the front of the building and a set out the left side. I figure the front ones are for the coal, and the side tracks for “not coal”.
That area to the left could be either a bagging area for raw ore, or a ‘stamp mill’ - then the crushed ore was bagged and shipped out the dock in front of that area.
Jim
[wow][:O] $10 is a steal for that!
The name of the Red Mountain Town mine is the National Belle Mine.
The Denver Public Library has an extensive collection of images, including many of the National Belle. If this works right, this link will take you right to a bunch of them:
http://photoswest.org:8080/cgi-bin/cw_cgi?resultsScreen+2481+1+10+0
If not, go to this page and enter “National Belle” as the search term:
http://history.denverlibrary.org/images/index.html
There are some images of Red Mountain Town here, on Mark Evans’ great website:
http://www.narrowgauge.org/
http://www.narrowgauge.org/ncmap/excur2_red_mnt_town.html
As for what the different parts of the building were used for, you’ve had a good start. The boiler and other mechnical apparatus is in the part of the building under the smoke stack. This will also include a hoist engine that controls the cables that run up to the top of the headframe in the center section and the air compressors that sent compressed air down to the rock drills, etc in the mine.
The center section will be roughly centered over the shaft. A hoist cage goes up and down there, with the cable going over the pulley wheel at the top of the headframe then back into the take-up reel on the hoist engine I just mentioned in the boiler room. Some mines also had bins for ore located in the headframe, but I can’t say if this one was big enough to house that here.
The left area is where the ore sorting was done and where supplies going down into the mine were staged. Just below this in front is the end of the sorting bins on the prototype. If you look at the old pictures, you can see that it, along with others parts of the structure, changed over the year. I lengthened this part of the mine so that the main part of the structure sits father uphill than the kit picture you posted shows. You can see how much farther this was with the pictures of the actual mine. Depending on how much space you have to place it in, you can adjust this intermed
The tracks leading out of the left side of your photo at building floor - hoist car level would lead to a waste rock dump. Not everything coming out of the shaft would be worth bagging.
The hoist engine would be at the bottom of the slope-roofed section, which is actually a weather cover over the diagonal bracing part of the headframe. There would be some serious timberwork under that roof and behind that siding.
Note the smokepipe at the other end of the structure. There was probably a pot-bellied stove (or, possibly, a Franklin stove) under it.
Red Mountain is at a very high elevation, and has only two seasons, cold and colder. That’s why the building enclosed structure that would have been left exposed in less severe conditions. If you intend to leave doors open, it must be July!
Chuck (modeling Central Japan in September, 1964)
Thanks for all the info. I’d say the actual pics are different. I’ll have to ponder being able to model the scene. It is cool, and that’s the “look” I’m into.