IN my research I found that I a city I was going to model had as a major industry a gravel mine that supplied the railroads near and far with gravel. Seems like a natural industry to model.
I don’t have a clue what one would look like, let alone what one would look like in 1917.
Coming from an area that produces a lot of gravel, around here most of it comes from pits or quarries. Ours was left as eskers or morraines in the ice age and they just strip off the dirt layer (Topsoil $20 a yard) and shovel the rest into dump trucks. As afar as I know, none of them is directly rail served.
I’m buildin on to a gravel building myself right now. i think having one would be a great
addition to a layout.
Here in Arizona there are a lot of rock and sand businesses that just go out and dig it out of the ground, leaving a big empty pit. In most cases, there’s very little top soil to strip off.
I saw a railway video on RFD-TV about the Union Pacific line through Cheyenne and Sherman Hill, Wyoming, where a company is grinding away an entire mountain peak of solid granite and selling it as railway ballast and to concrete companies as aggragate. Long strings of ballast hoppers and hundreds of truckloads are shipped out daily.
Cool.
ICMR
Happy Railroading.[swg][swg]
In Minnesota it would be a hole in the ground or the side dug out of a hill making it look like a creasent moon. In some areas where the rock is harder and they blast and then crush (Crushed rock instead of gravel) the sides of the pit will be vertical and stepped. Some times the steps will also be roads or even railroads. I have only seen that in iron mines and a gravel pit near Chicago.
In 1917 you would have lots of men with shovels, draft horses pulling carts to the railhead, buildings to house the tools and horses, a cook house and maybe a bunkhouse for the workmen but those are much easer to replace than the tools or horses so the bunkhouse would not be much. There were trucks in 1917 but I doubt that many had made it into gravel pits yet. The steam shovel at Ohio Valley Antique Machinery Association was built about that time but I have no idea how common they were.
Here in San Antonio, gravel is a big industry. In fact thats the main commodity carried by trains in my area. I actually got the chance to tour one of the big gravel pits one time and its quite a site. Probably a mile or two across with switchback roads to get out the truckloads of gravel. Boy those trucks are big! Anyway, its not something you could model to scale, but if you want to convey the idea of a gravel mine I would dig a pit or cliff and have lots of heavy machinery to dig it out. I remember a very extensive network of conveyors and belts that dumped the gravel into huge piles which were loaded onto another conveyor via a trap door underneath and then taken to whatever truck or train car. Try and search it to get some pictures to help you out. I think it should be a really neat feature on a layout.
A gravel pit or quarry would have steam shovels and steam powered crushers. By 1917 there could be early dump trucks to haul the gravel, but if it was an old or small operation it would used horse drawn wagons. The gravel could be loaded into a bunker and then into hoppers or gondola cars (mostly hoppers east of the Mississippi, mostly gondolas west ) or dumped directly from the trucks/wagons into the cars.
For bunkers, you can use wooden coaling towers (two side by side) with the legs shortened or cut off completely and resting on stone foundations (its a quarry, they have lotsa stone). For the dump version buy a Pikestuff wooden overpass and use all/half of it to build a ramp that the trucks/wagons can drive up to dump the gravel into the car.
Dave H.
Gravel pit carved out of the side of a styrofoam hill. Blasted stones placed in a steam driven jaw crusher. A steam donkey pulls a big metal rake/bucket towards a steel ramp and draws crushed outfall from the crusher up the ramp and into a hopper over a butt-end with creosoted timber bumper.
Chip, I’ve never heard of gravel being mined. It’s usually quarried. We have an aggragate quarry only like three miles down the road from us. There’s rail action coming and going there 24-7.
I prefer gravel trees myself! [:p] Most likely a quarry operation. Check at your library in the local history section or do an internet search for quarry images then just sort out the old ones.
underworld
[:D][:D][:D][:D][:D]
Chip,
May not fit your era, but check at the hobby shop for Kalmbach book, “Six HO Railroads You Can Build”. The cover photo shows a rock crusher, the prototype of which was located on the ATSF in Oklahoma along the Wa***a River. The story inside is a condensation of a series which appeared in Model Railroader some years ago. The crusher in the articles was scratchbuilt by Gordon Odegard, but the Wathers Glacier Gravel kit is based on Gordy’s scratchbuilt project.
As mentioned above I’ve never heard of a gravel mine. Gravel pit or quarry, but not a mine.
Cheers
The obscenity filter on this forum is being silly! The river in Oklahoma is pronounced the same as the mountain range in Arkansas which is spelled Ouachita. It’s just that the “Ouach” part is spelled “Wash” in Oklahoma. Wash uh taw. The filter deletes the part of the name of the river between “s” and “t”. The name of the layout is the “Wa***a and Santa Fe” I’ll bet part of that got deleted too.
Seems that around this time the steam shovel was or had been used extensively in Panama. The question for research is if the "bunker’ would have sized the gravel in a fashion similar to the way coal bunkers sized coal by screening and seperate bins within the bunkers for the different sizes.
Don’t forget the armed guards to protect the gravel trains from high jacking. [}:)][:D][;)]
Will
I hear Clint Eastwood is doing a movie about the Dos Rios Gang who plagued the California gravel industry for almost a decade. Although Brad Pitt is a stretch for “Rocky” Calhoun, who was was ugly as a baboon’s bottom. You know, I hate when thugs like Rocky are glamourized.
Trucks were already becoming common by 1917 and since trucks used solid rubber tires at that time, gravel was a perfect load, as were coal, grain & lumber. To give you an idea of what kind of load a truck in that era could handle, check out this photo:
By 1917, there were already over 5 million motor vehicles registered in the U.S. including cars, trucks and motorcycles (there were about a quarter-million motorcycles).
