I want to model a scene where ore cars are unloaded at the waterfront into barges - a small scale operation, not a huge ship-sized thing. All the pictures I have found of ore dump trestles are the kind where the ore is dumped from the hopper cars into a bin, which is then offloaded to one or more barges at another time.
My problem is I haven’t the linear space to gain enough elevation for that without having a ridiculously steep incline to the trestle, or a rather unsatisfactory sudden change in “sea level” from one end of the layout to the other!
So I wonder if there is any prototype evidence for a facility where the ore car discharges almost directly into a waiting barge, down a short chute or similar. I realise in practice it would mean the rail and water transport would need to be in sync, probably ending up waiting for each other, hence why storage bins are the obvious approach.
As I say, this is a small-scale operation, 20’s/30’s steam era. Short wooden ore cars.
Just throwing ideas out there to see if any stick. Look up Thornburger hoist or Excelsior Hoist, Mc Myler dumper, Brownhoist.
In Cleveland, several types were used for loading coal into the boats for the return trip. On “my” side of the Great Lakes the ore was unloaded and coal loaded for shipment north.
Still, similar machines could be modeled. Note how the rack is angled upward to gain elevation so the hopper car track would not have to be so high above the mean water level. (first photo)
There were several examples of machines like this along the shores of Lake Erie. The Mc Myler dumper. Again, to load outbound coal but why couldn’t it be used for ore?
The scenario you describe would most likely hinge on the capacity of the barge. If the capacity of the barge is such that cars must be accumulated to fully load it, track must be provided for holding cars until enough are on hand to load the barge. How long does it take the barge to make a cycle–load, travel, unload, return, load again? The output of the mine, the appetite for ore at the barge’s unloading point, and the barge’s travel time will govern the railroad operation and the necessity of of possibly storing cars of ore until the barge(s?) are available. Most often, rail winds up waiting for water. That’s why most ore is dumped into pockets to await water transport. I realize you envision dumping ore directly into the barge but, in the event there is a disruption in the water leg of the trip, there might be a track or more to hold the mine’s continued output without building storage bins. It may mean an expanded car fleet. That ore needs to be pretty valuable to deal with small quantities and expeditious handling!
The hulett loaders. Those brontosaurus looking contraptions. They loaded and unloaded ores all around the lakes. Only one place i saw where they did both load and unload. Ore out coal in.
Here in Philadelphia prr and Reading then conrail had a large port for oreand coal. Coal being out bound. The coal cars went up a small ramp. Something the space you have could do. Ran throuugh a rotary dumper. Onto a conveyor. It either moved it right to the ship or diverted to stock pile. The car rolled out the back to a kickback track. A working version of a kickback track would be unique and space saving. That took place on the tight narrow confines of piers.
There was a single Hulett used for unloading garbage somewhere near Chicago. As far as I know none were actually used for loading a boat since the design simply would not allow it. The bucket at the end of the leg would dump into a hopper then that, in turn was dumped into a larry car where the ore could be directly dumped into railroad cars or hoisted further back and dumped into the storage pile.
I have an ore dock. I am in N scale and scratch built a hullet ore unloader from the October 1997 RMC article. the article has full size diagrams to allow you to use them a templates. It is only tn inches deep by six inches wide, so it does not take up a lot of space. They can always be blown up to HO scale if you want to scratch build one. In HO Walthers had a hullet kit, do not know if they are still available.
What type of ore? Iron ore? Gold or Silver ore? It makes a difference. Narrow gauge railroads ran trains with a few cars of gold or silver ore at a time. Iron Ore by the 1920’s was a major operation - large ore docks and ore boats, 100 car trains pulled by Mallets.
In the taconite era, ore cars were often unloaded into a storage area near the docks, to be later moved onto the ore dock by a conveyor. Unfortunately that’s 40 years after your era. You could just model the ore dock yard, and not the dock itself? You could have a track supposedly leading to an ore dock that just goes off the layout to an unscenicked staging area. 10-15 loaded ore cars leave the yard, 10-15 empty ones come back.
Thank you everybody who contributed. As always, some valuable information and inspiration. As much as I love all those contraptions they would be far too big for what I envisage. Maybe one day … nah, will never happen!
Perhaps I shouldn’t have used the word ‘ore’ - this branch of my proposed line would be servicing a small quarry (limestone or maybe granite) and shipping the rock out to wherever. Not huge slabs, and not ultra-valuable stuff, but just ‘another industry’ that can employ some rolling stock I like.
This is going to be a freelanced railroad anyway (whose owners do things “their way”) so I guess I’ll just follow that star and invent something that fits and is scenically appealing, while providing some operational interest.
I used to live along a branchline that saw several covered hoppers a week of rock being delivered to a company called Model Stone Co. that used the rock for construction - crushed rock to mix with concrete, and for landscaping. In the 1930’s, I’d assume that would have been done in open hopper cars.
Unless your layout is set on an island or something, like one of the remote rail lines in northern British Columbia that are only accessible by lake or river barge, I don’t know why they would be trans-loading the rock from a hopper car to a boat and then presumably back to a hopper car for final delivery to the customer?
When you look at the whole iron ore/coal shipping traffic around the Great Lakes one would wonder the same thing.
The Summer 2000 Classic Trains magazine has an article by Herb Harwood titled Boom Times for Lake Erie Coal and Ore which addresses the subject.
One paragraph in the article mentions “For arcane commercial reasons that reach back at least a half century, the coal rate structure favored transshipping coal from rail to water back to rail again rather than use all-rail delivery”.
The article then goes on to cite an example of coal hauled to Toledo, Ohio where it was loaded onto lake freighters to be floated north to Wyandotte and Detroit — less than sixty miles away, and on the same rail lines. This arrangement also caused peaks and valleys of traffic as lake shipping was shut down four or five months out of the year due to ice.
I can’t understand how all the added expense and odd logic of this arrangement paid-off other than to say, we always did it that way.
Well I think there’s a big difference between shipping thousands of tons of iron ore and shipping one or two cars worth of rock for ballast.
For iron ore, one ore boat c.1940 could hold about 8-10 140 car trains worth of iron ore. Plus it was a loads in / loads out operation in some cases, as coal would be sent from the east by boat to Duluth / Superior. During WW2, Duluth/Superior ore docks would be loading several boats each day with ore. It would have greatly clogged the already overloaded rail system to have all those 24’ ore cars running in trains from Minnesota or Upper Michigan to Chicago, Detroit, or Cleveland.
The Reading had small rail to barge dumps without bunkers that were built around the trun of the century in Pt Richmond in Philadelphia. I’ve only seen pictures of them in some limited edition Reading books.
There are also the docks used for coal transfers on the canals:
Thanks everyone for some thought-provoking comments and some fascinating pictures.
With regard to “why do this at all”, I suppose I was inspired by a scene on the Degulbeef & Cradding layout where an ore train was unloading (albeit via a storage bin) into a waiting barge. It just seemed a great bit of modelling opportunity and operation potential.
I didn’t get as far as thinking why they’d do it, or where the barge was going!
One reason they used the bins for iron ore, not necessarilly the taconite pellets, is that there were various grades of iron ore. A mill would order the grades of ore and they would be stored in the bins and the various bins would be loaded into the boat to make the grade of ore the mill wanted.
