With working unloader and cars with rotary couplers?
Years ago there was one S-scaler who had a working cartipper on his layout. Single cars, though, not rotary couplings. I also seem to remember that someone used to sell kits for the ‘roller coaster’ unloaders found on Chesapeake Bay coal piers. John Armstrong mentioned them in his layout planning books, but I don’t know who, if anybody, ever built and operated one.
Most modern coal unloaders are inside shelters, to keep the dust under control.
I’ve been experimenting with a train dumper that will unload a whole string of open-top cars at once. It will be located ‘offstage’ in staging, so it probably won’t look very realistic. All it has to do is work.
Chuck
I guess Sergent finally released their rotary couplers. I also saw an article somewhere in regards to turning a #5 into a rotary coupler.
http://user.icx.net/~sergent/glatzl.htm
I thought I would try a magnet system in a building (to hide it ) that would lift the coal out of the cars as they rolled slowly thru, Bachmann cars with a plastic flat load.
A conveyor system or something like that would pull them out and under the layout into a container where I can take them back up to the mine.
The other end would be the trick getting them accurately back into the cars.
I was going to do a loads in empties out ( cheating) but have changed my mind, I want more operation.
Ken.
I saw an operating single-car tipper in S-guage at the Greenberg train show in Massachusetts last month. They are working on a loader as well, so they’ll have full coal ops to play with. The tipper was scratch-built, and very nicely done at that.
I’m modelling the 1960’s in HO, but I plan on running real coal loading and unloading, too. I have a small fleet of the old Mantua clamshell door hoppers which open to unload coal on a specially-shaped actuator track. My loader is an old Vollmer kit.