Most of the models we have of coal mines are single structures. I have this model, an N-scale one I picked up in eBay. I think it is an AHM, but I’m not sure.
Near as I can figure, A is the room that brings coal up the shaft and deposit it in B. In this room the slag and impurities are separated and the coal is sent to C where it is dropped into hoppers. I cannot imagine this operation filling more than 2 or 3 coal cars per hour due to the physical limitations if the size of the building. The slag is send down the chute to D where the lower grade coal is separated from the slag and it is dropped into one of the three E bays below. The slag is removed and the coal that can be sold is loaded into trucks or hoppers.
To me this seems to be an incomplete operation as there are no offices, rest rooms, equipment storage facilities, etc.
So the question are:
Am I right in my assumptions above?
What auxiliary structures would you expect to find in an operation this size?
I would presume your letters are correct. A, B, C, D and E. Now here is a few tidbits.
You would want oil to spray onto the coal to keep dust down. Some mines did this and advertised it as such. Dustless coal etc.
The tipple loader GENERALLY had a pile of sorted coal to load into the hopper. USUALLY he had a chute to guide the coal into the hopper car. Most of the time the hopper car sat on a downgrade that is very gentle. There was a crewman on the ground that will have a iron bar and loosen the brake wheel of that hopper car to drift it as it is being loaded. Eventually that hopper car is drifted down to the loads outbound area.
Usually there are several more hoppers on that track BEHIND the tipple.
Mine trains came up in the morning, dropped the empties ready to be drifted under the tipples and departed with loads later in the day.
It would be a rather low output mine, but if you can find a bunch of mines along a branch … say 4 of them suddenly that mine train is going to be groaning with coal coming back down.
Mine run coal had everything in it. Unsorted. Cheep.
Stoker coal I think were smaller pea sized coal… probably sold for home coal heat/hot water units.
Baseball sized coal (Lump?) went to industry or shipping.
Other sizes got quite big but there I think was about 6 general differences in size with a specific family of end users for that size coal.
I don’t think that’s an American prototype and I am not convinced it is actually even a coal mine structure. The nifty clerestory ventilators are just the sort of thing that coal mines in the U.S., especially small impecunious mines, would never purchase. The brick and stone base structure is also highly suspect; coal mines in the U.S. of small size were impermanent operations that had no spare cash for fixed plant of anything but the slipshoddiest construction.
As you point out it’s highly incomplete, if indeed it’s a coal mine structure.
Coal would MOST likely enter this structure through an elevated trestle (not shown) at floor level of B. That trestle would lead from either a portal into an adjacent hillside or from a headhouse from a shaft. The floor space in B is very small and only for miniscule quantities of coal would there be room for crushing or sorting – really, all you can accomplish here is dump the car into a chute into a hopper or gon underneath. As for filling 2-3 cars an hour: it would be more like 2-3 cars per day in a mine this small if it’s dumping mine cars. You could stick a conveyor belt in there and get better throughput, maybe 8 cars a day if you had a car puller to keep moving the cars forward. Or get a medium-sized Cat, Michigan or IH wheel loader, and after first using it to knock over this collection of sticks and shoving it into the nearest gully, use the space to load the hoppers directly.
The bays in E are so narrow you could hardly get anything bigger than a donkey-drawn 2-wheel cart into them. More likely that lump coal was dumped into them (3 bays, 3 sizes) and shoveled by hand into a wagon, cart, or pickup truck parked outside. Dropping lump coal is a really good way to turn it into slack coal, thereby destroying its value, so I’m dubious that this is really the purpose of the bays (again, not sure this is actually a coal mine!).
I noticed this on several of my old coal mine structures to, I have 3 of them, all AHM structures. The first one is very large and has a good size foot print, has a large uper and lower area, where the coal must be seperated with to unloading areas, its an old wood structure. Another one I have is just like the one in the above photo’s. The third one is a skinny upright structure that mounts in front of the tracks and is suppose to have a dump pit, this one is not a mine but a transfer station I would think. It has a chute on the back side and a series of buckets on cables that come up from the front and dump in the bunker, all wood construction, with small brick building attatched.
I have the same model. I have been using it for years as a coal/ore station of sort. I inherited it from my dad when he went HO years ago. He built it originally in the late 60’s or early 70’s. It’s a solid little structure with some nice detail.
Can’t tell you much about the loader you have there. The easiest thing i can tell you is go to http://appalachianrailroadmodeling.com They have alot of info and pictures of various types of loaders from truck dumps to flood loaders and everything in between. They also have a good ABC’s of loaders and ops section which i think is very good. If you haven’t been to this site already i think you will find it very informative.
Chip, depending on the era, here are some of the other structures that you would find.
power plant. Many mines burned coal to generate electricity and steam for the mine and the surrounding mine community. Frequently with a good size chimney.
Miners shed where the would shower and dress into their below ground clothing. These were often 2 stories high with open vents in the sides of the top story. The workers would pull their gear up on cables for drying and security, padlocking the cable suspending the clothing up high.
Mule shed, still for mules or other storage.
Offices and miscellaneous sheds for activities like blacksmith or maintenance activities.
Ventilation shafts (often a significant distance form the main mine head. Usually also acted as a secondary escape route from below ground. They might even have a structure housing huge ventilation fans.
If it is a shaft mine they would have a mine head super structure as well.
This is all based on research I did into the construction of a mine scene modelling a specific Illinois shaft mine at start of the 20th century.
Are we talking about current mines or mines from a pre-deisel era? All of the coal mining around here today and for the past several years at least is open pit mining.
I am curious what you find out about that kit. I have this one as well. I believe mine is from the late seventies or early eighties. I’m guessing this is one of those models that looks neat, but doesn’t accurately depict an actual industry. Kind of like the old brewery that everyone seems to have. How many breweries have you seen that were that small? I hope someone has more information on this kit. If it isn’t a form of coal mine, what else could you use this for?
I feel your pain. My small mine scene is obviously incomplete; I ended up kitbashing an N scale Walthers New River Mine following Jim Kelly’s kitbash of the HO version in the April 2005(?) MR…
Two things hopefully help add credibility; I added a mine office (a Hay Brothers Garage Quonset hut) and a mine supervisor (the tall gentleman in the hardhat in front of the hut) and the chain-link fence. You don’t see the start or end of that fence (it disappears into the trees), suggesting the mine property is bigger than it is, and that there are probably other support structures about.
But I’m keenly aware that I have no shower house, no power station, no dynamite shed, no heavy mining equipment, and that the stub-end track arrangement is pretty limited.
Agreed. Pit mining, strip mining, hydro mining etc. are not very pretty and in some cases very harmful to the environment. Around here the pit is all we have. Not sure about other parts of Canada?
I agree with the other comments that this was originally a European model. I have a similar one in HO scale, except the tipple section (B and C) has more of a US look. On my model there are some rails cast into into the base of level D (above those three bays). Maybe these rails are the coal delivery method.
My thought is that the coal or ore comes in on small mine cars (maybe even human powered) and gets side-dumped into the structure on level D. The incline up to B is a hoist to move the coal to the tipple. The slack and maybe the slate could be dumped in the E bay… (Must… resist… bad… pun…!!!)
There would need to be a power source of some kind to power the hoist, maybe a small boiler house that would send steam to an engine on Level D and pehaps another on level B to move the conveyors in the tipple. Would need to add some steam exhaust stacks.
Anyway, that’s how I was going to make it work - run a trestle from the mine entrance to the rails on level D, use a few 1968 vintage HOn3 side dump mine cars I have, and plan on one or two cars/day from this mine.
Hello, name’s Richard B. I live in the heart of coal country’Boone County West Virginia’, I can tell you everything you need to know about coal mining. I myself am an experienced deep miner. Your small loadout is just a start, and a pretty nostalgic one"I like it". For the full effect, you would want to incorporate a raw coal in-flow, say from a deep mine, a coal truck dump, or a overland belt nowdays, from a local strip or auger mine. Raw coal is before the coal has been cleaned and processed for market sale. The tipple serves as a cleaning facility, some tipples have an internal train loadout, but nowdays most have a remote loadout, or stand alone. You would need at least 2 sediment holding tanks, or ponds, as you can’t dump the coal waste straight into fresh water. You would want a dirty coal stock pile with a belt line running into the tipple. As the coal was cleaned, sized and refined, you would want to send it back outside to a clean coal pile. From the clean coal pile the coal would be pushed by dozer into underground feeders and routed by belt line to your stand alone loadout, or back into the loadout portion of your tipple.
as you can see the coal comes out of the shaft via small push hoppers and is dumped at the base of the conveyor it’s then taken to the top of the tipple
where it goes thru shakers and screens to sort then dispensed into waiting hopper cars
There’s an office/equipment building and a shed for the Jeffery Mine Motor
Still absent is a power supply house and a water retention pond
I have seen that model sold as a sand and gravel mine as well.
Remember that their are at least 2 types of coal, bituminous and anthracite. Anthracite is also known as hard coal. Anthracite is mostly in Eastern Pennsylvania. The coal was brought out of the mine and then put through a “breaker” to get it broken up and seperated into the various sizes and cleaned of any contanimant (dirt). In the early part of the 20th century they paid young boys to pick through the coal to get any rocks and such out. Anthracite coal breakers were huge monsters. I believe there is a law that the breaker cannot be directly on the mine. Apparently they had some fires where the breaker caught fire and the miners were trapped. In many cases, the coal was brought to the breaker from several mines owned by the same company. Sometimes it was handled by the narrow gauge mine railroad and for mines further apart the full size railroad handled it. So a breaker could be a loads in/loads out operation. Also there should be a big pile of “tailings” basically the low grade stuff and junk they pick out.
Here is the Huber Breaker in Ashley, PA, no longer in use. They are trying to preserve it as a museum.
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