For the past few years, SCDOT has been slowly and I mean slowly, repaving the 15 miles of I-26 I use to get to work. I thought this would make a cool scene on my new layout. The actual repaved road should be easy, just paint the new pavement dark black and the old light gray.
Does anybody make models of the equipment used to repave a road? I would need and asphalt spreader and a steam roller and possibly a line painting truck. Also, I plan on modeling the transition era. As such I don;t believe they used the bright orange plastic barrels to close lanes like they do today. What did they use?
The old Mini Machines line popular about 10 years ago had all sorts of this type of equipment available in about 1:144 scale, close enough for construction equipment, though it tended to be a little cartoonish. At the same time Norscott had similarly scaled Cat equipment that looked much better.
Matchbox and others have made construction equipment that scaled to large size for N scale but believable.
Bachman used to have a package of N scale construction equipment that included a bulldozer, grader and Euclid truck. The truck was small, but the others were acceptable stand ins for older Cat equipment.
Construction and mining equipment are sort of neat in that a model that is to scale in one scale is still believable as larger or smaller ± one scale.
I have no idea how to get this equipment now, though I’m sure it comes up on places like Ebay and at shows from time to time.
Just some other food for thought. We are right on the edge of technology that could take a very nice 1:48 construction equipment model, scan it, and 3D print it at any scale you want. It sure would be nice if this were affordable and easy to use. Maybe in a few years…
I have some micro machines, They aren’t as close as some think they are to N scale. I’ll be gone a while so it’ll be a bit before I get some pictures up.
Since the Interstate system wasn’t started until into the Eisenhower administration, there were very few large highways except around some of the largest cities.
Many of the roads were made of concrete. Forms and a concrete truck, with plenty of labor on hand would fit.
The small town I lived in got Main St paved. It was smoothed by a grader, had a layer of crushed stone spread and rolled, then liquid tar sprayed on with more crushed stone on top, again rolled. Very messy, just ask my bicycle. A grader, dump trucks and a steam roller would do for equipment along with another large labor force.
For asphalt, my early memories were of hopper on rollers. A dump truck load of asphalt would back up to it, workers attached it to the truck. The truck would dump its load slowly into the hopper and pull it along. When empty, change trucks and keep going. If a new road, a grader would be needed to get the base smooth, if repaving it wouldn’t be necessary. Truck loads of asphalt, a scratch built hopper to go behind the trucks and a roller would be adequate. Of course all those fellows with shovels and rakes would still be needed.
As for safety equipment, I seem to remember steel barrels, though not a great many of them. The flaggers did not have radios, but flags (what a concept). Each flagger had a red flag to stop traffic. There was one green flag and the flagger that had it would hand it to the driver of the last car in the group of cars he sent through. When they got to the other flagger, they handed it to him and he used it to signal his cars to go. My dad seemed to be very good at getting the green flag to carry through the construction zone. Fond memories, as I didn’t see him too often.
For transition era, should be able to do a good job with available equipment. Those new monsters fed by the semi dump trucks would be quite a project.
Instead of the barrels, they used sawhorses. The horizontal board was wide and sat vertical. (Long edges up and down) They were painted white with black stripes at about a 45 degree angle although there were also yellow ones with black stripes depending on the state code of the time.
The length of the sawhorses were about 6 to 9 feet. At night, they would put battery operated caution lights on them that blinked. A battery light would consist of an orange box that held a large 6 volt or 12 volt dry cell. Mounted to the box on top was one round yellow caution light. They used two lights per sawhorse, spaced out. The light had a bracket that allowed them to sit on the edge of the board between the horse ends.
I forgot the old smudge pots they used for warning lights at night. They were basically a black steel ball, with a flat bottom and a little housing on the top, protecting the wick. I would say they used cheap kerosene as they gave off a rather black smoke. (Probably no longer EPA approved.) They would burn all night, don’t know if they had to be refilled on weekends or not.
Many times you would see them clustered in a safe place to keep them out of the way and for refilling.
I was told that it was a mixture of kerosene mixed with used diesel oil. The oil slowed down the burning so that they would burn longer and that is also why they smoked so much.
A couple of times in my early driving career, early sixties when I was driving for my Father, I had to leave a truck on the road overnight. For a warning flare, we would have a large can, like a ketchup can, and we would put a roll of toilet paper in it soak it in used oil with a couple of cups of kerosene on top and light it up. It would burn all night and you would have to put it out in the morning. They really worked, but polluted the air around it. [+o(]
Besides the black and white sawhorses and smudge pots, the other big marker were old 55 gallon drums. Painted black with the middle band painted white. And, when they first went to the rubber cones, the ones I remember were also black with the top 6 inches or so yellow and a yellow band a couple inches below that.
This was during the 60s/70s and I always loved when we drove by where the big interstates were going in through the Appalachians. We had to take the old road up Saluda (loved the way the road paralleled and crossed the railroad in the town of Saluda BTW) and could watch I26 going in. That 10 minute ride up I26 took an hour to an hour and a half off the drive – esp if you got behind a big truck on that old road. You were stuck behind them at 10-15 MPH the whole way.
During the 70s Sloan (are they still the big paving outfit there) ran an asphalt plant near our home. The basic paving equipment was pretty unchanged to today. They had some monster 5 axel dumps that hauled the asphalt out. You could probably use a small Cat dump truck from a larger scale and it would still look reasonable.