What goes on in the separator house in a silver mine?
Here’s a picture of a separator house–in fact the prototype that I am modeling.
Okay I get it that they remove a lot more of the slag from the ore.
The ore goes into the house on the lower trestle track. Somehow the good stuff gets into the ore bin below to be loaded into ore cars.
But what is that trestle track on the top for? It is directly above the lower track, but it stops about 20 feet from the house (just to the right of the picture). I thought it might be for dumping slag, but it would go right onto the lower trestle.
And how does whatever goes up there get up there. I mean, it has to be heavy right?
I would have thought that the top track was the input. The stuff is heavy so they would use gravity to help the process. OK, the trestle stops 20’ from the separator, but did it when it was in full production? If you think about it you have one input (the output from the mine) and at least 2 outputs, the silver ore and the separated slag. In a coal mine there could be several outputs for the coal with the coal being sized into different grades.
The lower track is slightly lower than the mine opening. The ore would have gone from the mine to the separator along that track. The upper one dead ends half way back to the mine. The model track ends at the same point. The upper track is on the same trestle structure as the lower track. And it is a full story in the air. There is no where obvious it could go. If it continued it would run into the head frame about half-way up.
Actually, I’m only assumng it is a track. I can’s see the tracks, just the under side of the platform. It could be a sundeck for all I know.
Judging from the condition of the mine and ore tipples around Virginia City thaqt I have seen, I would be worried that there are structures that used to be there that are long gone. That would lead to confusion about the function of various trestles. Where is this located? - Nevin
You’re right! that upper deck has got to be a sun deck. After all the hours under ground the miners would need to catch some rays. the difficult thing is going to be to find out where they chilled the beers. [:-^]
Isn’t it possible that Muir Models is just copying what currently exists after years of neglect and collapse, and that the track originally did go all the way to the building? I’ve never been to Tonopah or any other former silver mine site, so this is only a guess.
Tombstone, Arizona originally had silver mines, but nothing remains of any of them. The ore from Tombstone was hauled by mule train to a site that is today known as Mill Town on the San Pedro River, nearly 10 miles from Tombstone, for processing. No structures remain at Mill Town either; just the slag pile and ghost town of Charleston, where the Mill Town workers lived.
If the Gunfight at OK Corral had never occurred, Tombstone itself would probably be just a ghost town today.
Mouse, I wonder if this was a washery, or if it was purely a screening facility. If it was a washery, then it would have had flumes or something else to get water to the building…any evidence of that? If just a screening facility, it would have had steam or horse powered shakers on frames with large screens to separate finer ore from larger crud that would require more work and more wast handling in a smelter or in a mill, depending on the intended destination.
If it’s a seperator, then the chances are that the highest track trestle extended to the sidehill and was the ore loading track. Here in the Northern Mines area of California, gold ore was always loaded from the top and processed down through crushers and seperators. It’s called “Stamping.” By the time the ore-bearing quartz had been crushed enough, the lower levels were used to separate the gold from the ore with chemicals. There is a classic example still existing of this type of mine in Sierra City, CA–in fact, Grandt Line makes a model of it–the Kentucky Mine–which I have on my Yuba River Sub. The waste material was usually disposed of on various levels by trestles which extended out from the mine building and were gradually filled in with the waste rock, as ore jimmies dumped it.
Does it seem likely that they would raise the ore an extra 15 feet to get it to the upper track. I guess if they already raised it through the mine opening another 15 feet wouldn’t matter would it?
To answer your question–yes. Many of the original mine-shafts were driven horizontally into the side of a hill, then vertically down, following the particular vein of gold or silver. Most of the mines in California, Colorado, and especially the Comstock mines in Virgina City were side-hill horizontals, THEN verticals. The ore was lifted up from the shafts to the top level of the Stamper. At first, they used mule power (the mules turning a large wheel/rope lift) to bring up the ore jimmies, then later, steam-operated elevators. It was a complex process. But the separation in the Stampers always went from top to bottom (similar to 19th century coal mining in Pennsylvania).
Actually, noticing your photo again, I see that there are ore-chutes at the bottom of your building. That means that the process only went so far, then the ore was either dumped into wagons, or possibly railroad gondolas for further stamping or processing. But I’d safely say that whatever your building was used for–possibly preliminary processing–it all came in from the top.
twhite hit the nail on the head. The track that headed halfway up the headframe is where the skips dumped into ore cars after coming up the inclined shaft. Primarily all that building was for was storing ore/waste for shipment. Ore would be dumped in one bin and waste in another.
