when i finally get to the train part of my layout i was thinking of a ore car train. and by the way thank all of you who answered my questins about height.(table and tunnel) but back to the train (ho scale) the time era i am trying to do is about 1910 wisconsin. in the walthers magazine they showed a 12 pack of ore cars which are steal. also i found wood ore cars. what would be more realistic steel or wood for that era.
Ken–
For the 1910 era, I think you’d be better off with the wooden ore cars. Tichy makes good-looking wooden ore cars, they come two to a kit. They’re not ‘shake the box’ kits, they’re pretty detailed with quite a few parts, but they’re beautifully engineered and go together exactly as they’re supposed to. I’ve built quite a few Tichy kits, and I certainly don’t consider myself a ‘craftsman’, but I’ve always been pleased with the results. It’s a good company, and their car kits are worth the time, IMO.
Tom
Ken, I am not into the era thing, but I do have a lot of ore cars. Last count around 65 or so. For the money Bachmann Silver cars are great cars, with coal load around $7.00 and steel wheels. Kadee 148’s slip right in and at correct height every time.
I all so have around 15 wood side ore cars by Athearn, kits cost me around $5.00 and cost of couplers and Proto 2000 wheels. Athearns take a little more work than the Bachmann, but still a good car if you are not looking for a lot of detail.
Cuda Ken
Ken:
Here on the (Lake Superior Region Ore Cars) the standard ore car prier to the turn of the century (the 20th) was a 25 ton wooden car. However, the last wooden construction ore cars to be delivered to either the DM&N or the D&IR were from in 1900.
Shortly after the turn of the “20th” the 50 ton all steel cars were already running the roads. In 1910 the DM&N had already taken delivery and was running their second generation (Class U5) all steel cars.
I’ve seen pictures of wooden cars “in the pit” at much later dates…But not on the road to the docks.
Sooo….At least here in MN, on the Missabe Range, I’m thinking steel cars would already be a must in your questioned time frame.
Check out Westerfield’s HO-scale models of the Summers steel ore car, catalog #11300 http://www.westerfield.biz/ The 1910 prototypes lasted into the 1950s. They are craftsman kits, and a bit expensive at $55 for two models without trucks and couplers, but they are very interesting prototypes.
Athearn doesn’t make a wood side ore car.
They did make a 1940 era composite side twin hopper, which could haul ore but was designed to haul coal.
It would be very rare to haul coal in an ore car, it would be a heavy capacity car with very little commodity in it.
Dehusman, I am holding one in my hand as I miss spell. This one is a Lehigh Valley car number 1402, look’s like bulid date is BLT 2-42?
Cuda Ken
dh:
I think you mean “ore in a coal hopper”, right? It’s true, though, that an ore car loaded with coal would be poor economy.
However, some railroads did haul ore in ordinary hoppers. The B&LE did so, and I think they still do. I am pretty sure the PRR did the same. Both of them hauled coal to the lake ports, and ore from the ports, so using the same cars made good sense. Iron ore is indeed heavy, so the cars wouldn’t appear full. In fact, hematite has a specific gravity of about 5.2, which is more than four times that of bituminous coal, at 1.2. If you fill a hopper with scale coal, dump it into a cup, remove 3/4 of it, and put that much ore in the hopper, it’s fully loaded.
Later on, the PRR used ore jennies.
In Wisconsin, some sort of shorty ore hopper would be much more suitable. There’s no big coal traffic going the other way, and the 24 foot cars fit the docks. They’re also neat-looking. The early era would be a very interesting one. Locomotives might be tough to find; nobody ever seems to make the old fat-boilered, low-driver Consolidations.
Ken,
The car you have is a 34’ 2 bay composite side hopper, probably rated at 50 or 70 tons for hauling coal or aggregates. Ore cars are much shorter and only have 1 bay so they line up with the storage pockets on the ore docks.
Don Z.
Which would be a cool scene to model too. The big local train club used to have a really cool on but I don’t know if they put it back up since they had to move. Where they were the layout was a walk around, permanently bulit and had detial from the edge to the middle. Unfortunetly where they were they didn’t have enough room to let people walk around the whole thing, only about half, and you couldn’t see very well at the inside stuff. But, as I said I know that layout was permanent, when I went to the check them out at the new place it was the weekend after the Mad Town train show so they were resetting everything up, and it was all modular. The old one was mostly city scape. I don’t think they had that corn field scene module I watched them re-assemble on the old layout so I’m wondering if just built a totally new layout.
Mark:
Those cars from Westerfield are really some nicely detailed cars…But at that price my three drags, totaling 76 cars, is pretty much out of reach….
And the prototype in not typical of the cars either.
I’ve been bashing the Walthers and the old MDC cars to represent the two major styles seen on the DM&IR in my modeled time frame (early 1960…something) and still I can’t depict the 80+ drags I saw as a kid. I’ll have to settle for shorter…Me thinks!
The Tichy wood cars might be your best bet. You should be able to get them in a 12-pack. Wood ore cars lasted into the 1930’s…
http://www.walthers.com/exec/productinfo/293-4012
Steel cars were just coming in around then. Westerfield has done some early steel ore cars, I know they did one that was used on the Great Northern, and are now doing a Summers ore car:
http://www.missabe.com/summerscar.html
The old MDC tapered side and rectangular ore cars are based on Upper Michigan steel cars (CNW and MILW prototype respectively, IIRC), which were a little narrower and a little taller than the Minnesota ore cars as modelled by Walthers - although Walthers is coming out with their version of the U.P. cars this year. All of these are a little new for 1910.
As noted, no Athearn ore cars made, wood or otherwise. Remember ore cars are short !! The Athearn hopper car is 34’ long I believe. Iron ore is heavy so the early oak wood cars with archbar trucks could only be about 24’ long, so ore docks were built to that spacing…as were all later cars. Still remember a Minnesota 24’ steel ore car loaded capy is 70 tons, about the same as many 40’ boxcars. Iron ore is much denser and heavier than coal, it only takes about half as much iron ore to load a coal hopper to capacity as coal does.
Both pics and models above by Milt Spanton.
That is a model of a war emergency twin hopper. It was designed to haul 50-55 tons of coal. they were built for several roads during the early parts of WW2 with wood sides to save steel for the war effort. The RDG had a version that was based on a design similar to the Stewart fishbelly twin and numerous other railroads (PRR, B&O, ATSF, etc) had composite war emergency hopper cars.
While it is possible that at some time in their life could have hauled ore, as could ANY hopper or gondola could, they were designed for and spent the majority of their life hauling coal.
Actually I meant “coal in an ore hopper”.
While ore jennies were used on the iron ore roads, once the ore was unloaded from the boats and carried to the steel mills it traveled in ore hoppers, ore gons, coal hoppers, and regular gondolas. In hoppers and ore hoppers it could be bottom dumped, ore gons were usually rotary unloaded and regular gons were unloaded by crane and bucket.
Sorry I missed post, but I did learn something. So these are ore cars?
Most of the time I see them at the steel plant.
Cuda Ken