I recall seeing an article in MR about a model scale house - used to weigh rr cars. I am planning on building a foundry, and when i used to worked at a foundry, we would weigh scrap metal adn such when it was trucked in; the model I am planning would apply to rr cars. Anyone know in what issue this appeared inI tried teh search function, all I saw were ‘scale houses"’)
Peter McArdle
I couldn’t find the issue by searching here either, but Walthers has a one piece cast one in their catalog/
Walthers Part # 87-114, p. 515 Walthers 2011 HO Scale Reference HO scale, $9.95,
The rest of the model is a set of tracks that run in front of the building. One set allows the locomotive and un-weighed cars to pass by the house. There is a second track that runs parallel to the first set that bear on the scale mechanisim to weigh a car. The second set of rails are switched at each end by frogless turnout points to move the car to be weighed over to the scale rails and then back onto the regular rails. The scale pit was covered by planking or steel panels, so modeling the whole scale house thing is pretty simple.
Here are some pictures of scale houses from Railroad Picture Archives.net.
http://www.rrpicturearchives.net/srchThumbs.aspx?srch=scale+house&search=Search
The most recent article is a one-page article by Andy Sperandeo on page 41 of the April 2009 MR. This article is in the 4th part of the Beer Line Series - Structure Building.
It uses Walthers Part # 933-3199 - Track Scales Kit - and if you want to operate it as a static weight station, you will need two switches that you will have to cut down to allow access to the ganlet track - one track is the bypass, and one is the scale track. The article covers the building of the scale track and switches - I’ll be using this method to build one of these for my layout. Part 5 of the Beer Line Series covers Operations - including the Scale Track. The Beer Line Series is a very good set of articles - I highly recommend it.
I picked up the Track Scales and a Walthers # 932-5650 Scale Test Car Undecorated Kit from ebay last year. Both are currently marked as “Out of Stock” or “Unknown”.
Hope this helps,
Gil, known as Bill somedays … [8D]
(edited to fix some typos)
If you use this index and enter “scalehouse” as all one word, you get this long string of results:
http://trc.trains.com/Train%20Magazine%20Index.aspx?view=SearchResults&q=scalehouse
You may be thinking of Andy Sperandeo’s article in the May 2009 MR issue about weighing cars – that was from the MR Beer Line project layout where they used the Walthers HO kit.
Bill Darnaby wrote about modeling a track scale in the September 2002 issue of MR. I think he used a Depots by John model for his HO scalehouse.
Edit: Oops, I see others posted the same info while I was going through the back issues …