Anyone seen or know if it’s been done?
RF&PRR
Yes. There is a club in Buffalo, New York that had an operational Flood loader for coal and a operating rotary dump to unload at the power plan. There would alway be a croud around the modules whenever they were loading or unloading.
V/R
Chris
Lancaster, CA
One of Kalpubco’s books, Realistic Animation, Lighting & Sound, has an article, Building a Working Coal Tipple (reprinted from Model Railroader,) which details using a home-brew auger to control live loading of hoppers under the loader. When I get around to adding the colliery structures to my 30 year old ‘end of the railroad’ module I intend to include the device to load cars on one track while using the others for an empties in/loads out exchange.
There are other designs, including several which have been commercially available.
One unresolved problem with loading open-top cars is that some method has to be devised to unload them. My solution calls for routing them to a special cassette with an off-center track, designed so the loads can be dumped and the coal recovered for return to the mine.
As for a functional coaling tower, it isn’t very practical unless you have some method of removing coal from the tenders. Our steamers don’t actually burn it…
Chuck (Modeling the coal industry in Japan in September, 1958 - er, 1964)
Just put a little hole in the bottom of the tender. [;)]
Chuck is correct in that the practicality of building a working coaling tower really serves no purpose as compared to an operating cola loader or a rotary dumper. The club has a working rotary dump on the layout that is really neat to watch when it works. I say when because we have to remember we are only building models. In many cases static models so they need to be either entirely scratch built or reconstructed to make them operational and reliable. Below is a link to a fully operational HO McMyler coal dumper that used to reside at the Garden State Model Railroad Club layout sadly they are no more. I talked to the guy who built it and he had countless hours of work into it. I have no clue where it is right now, most likely waiting for a new home. If your planning on building something like this alI have to say is good luck your going to need it.
No, but I operated on a layout that had working iron ore mines and an ore dock.
The “mines” had removable roofs where the operator could pour the ore in as the train pushed the cars under the tipple. The ore was then transported to the dock where the cars were dumped sideways (since the hopper bottoms didn’t really open) into the ship and funneled into coffee cans that were then ready to be moved back over to the mines and start over again in the next session. Much work for not much reward. The cool thing about this was that an operating session can be rated by the amount of ore moved with the “extra” trains. There are huge penalties for delaying a scheduled train which have to run on time.
Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and I was a teenager, I saved up my meager funds and eventually bought this operating coal loader from Vollmer:
The chute doors are pivoted at the top. There is a solenoid for each door which pushes out on the lever arm from the small round hole visible next to one of the chutes. Coal from the bin above then slides down into the waiting hoppers. The structure holds enough coal for 2 of these small hoppers. It is re-loaded by removing the roof.
The hoppers are old Mantua/Tyco “clamshell” cars with operating hopper doors on the bottom. When they pass over a special track, the doors open and the coal falls into a bin below the track:
All of these lived in boxes in my attic for 40 years. Amazingly, the coal loader solenoids still worked when I unpacked them a few years back. I had to repair the pivot hinges on one of the chute doors, but other than that I just cleaned it up and connected the wires to get this old thing working again.
Yup, I must say an operating Cola loader could come in pretty handy. Although you might want to be careful what you put in it to avoid Tanked cars … [(-D]
John
MrBeasley, along similar lines, the old Ulrich line had a kit for a triple hopper that had a sprung lever sysem that allowed the hopper doors to open when the car was pushed against a cast zamac trigger mechanism. When pressure was released. the spring pulled the doors shut. Worked quite well. I still have a couple in boxes somewhere in the house. Cars were die cast Zamac screwdriver kits.
I think Athearn also had an operating coal loader in HO scale. Might have worked by rotating a crank.