I am planning on modeling a small rock quarry on my new layout. However, I am not sure how rocks leave the quarry. What I mean by that is, do quarries only provide one size and type of rock? Or can customers request a certain size, shape i.e. block vs stones? Is it geologically possible to have multiple types of stone quarried in the same place? I realize that the earth, or what is in it, is not uniform so there is probably not going to be a concrete answer to my questions, but any information you can provide would be a big help. BTW I am modeling the midwest, Wisconsin to be exact, if it makes a difference.
there is a large limestone quarry near me and they run all the stone through a crusher and seperator then store the different grades and sizes in seperate giant piles. although they no longer ship by rail, they load trucks directly from the piles with large front end loader machines. truck pulls up beside the pile and the operator loads the rock inito it.
rail operations would not doubt use the same or similar procedure with elevators or conveyors and perhaps the same machines used to load out trucks.
there was a giant quarry on the south side of chicago right next to I-80. if you can locate it on bing maps bird’s eye view. you can probably see what you want to know. there was a big one just north of joliet too, i think it was on hwy 53.
First you need to decide if this is a gravel quarry or if it is mining ‘cut’ stone like granite blocks. A good Wisconsin example is the ballast quarry at Rock Springs that provides the ‘Pink Lady’ ballast used on the ex-C&NW lines. Something like this would have a crusher and rail loadout to fill hopper cars.
If mining large cut stone like the granite quarries around St Cloud & Mankato, MN: then there is a large ‘jib’ loadout that places the blocks on rail cars. I still see some blocks shipped by rail, but many times the wire cutter is on-site and the blocks are cut into slabs that are shipped by truck to local momument companies. Many years ago the ‘rainbow’ quarry at Morton shipped blocks via rail to the Cold Stone Quarry for cutting. The Rainbow quarry was on the M&StL and the Cold Spring Granite was on the GN.
Specifically the crushers/sorters. I have looked for a kit (found none) & decided to scratch build one, but do not have any info or Pix of crushers/sorters. I want to model two of them for a ‘timeline interchangable’ layout, 30-40’s era & modern.
I lived a 1/4 mile from a sand quarry in childhood, they dragline dreadged it then & barge suck it now. In college I saw that MASSIVE I-80 Limestone quarry on (whiplash) both sides of the HWY (like the BB cartoon) in IL mentioned previously.
From my young exploriation [of the SAND Quarry] (before I knew I would want to know what I was looking at) I saw a semi trailer sized box clad with angle iron, with 2-3 conveyors exiting it. One had stone & rock chute piling up rock that was larger than say 1/4" to 1/2"+ or so, into piles that were then moved by end loader elsewhere. Another feeding a large elevator conveyor that piled the refined sand to the ‘Great Piles’ that were endloaded & trucked to their destination. Under the conveyor there was an ultra-fine pile of dust like stuff that I eagerly collected for the toys (I was pre-teen then). The possible 3rd conveyor (different crews & times) may have been a mid-sized aggregrate the 1/4’ -1" for concrete mixing, again endloaded out. All the crusher/seperator conveyors were short 20’ -40’ or so, & if needed a larger independant one was added as a booster for larger piles.
Honestly, I wish I could go back in time & unleash the Nikon on it, so I could reproduce it in 1/87 scale for my layout as well. That was great info, when I didn’t know any better…
To your post, perhaps there are different crusher/sorters that could seperate the sizes of crushed stone for a specific purpose, as our sand quarry did/does. Usually (in my NE IA area), all the st
Quarrying (and mining) are broadly era specific. A simple example is that at one time most of a quarries output might go by rail except for a tiny amount for local use. More recently everything might be trucked out with some specific exceptions like limestone for the steel industry.
You wouldn’t usually get two completely different products (e.g. salt and granite) from one quarry but you could get two or more different variants of the same thing from one place. You might, for example get blocks, aggregate and dust from one quarry. This would tend to depend on product demand and the nature of the rock. (A quarry producing blocks will not just shut down if the demand drops but is likely to switch to crushed stone… unless the block value is very high when demanded e.g. marble). The rock might vary (possibly either side of a fault line through the quarry.
A block quarry will tend to drill and/or saw the blocks out of a face with little or no use of explosive… and any explosive will be “soft” to crack the block away with minimum damage.
An aggregate quarry will usually blast any solid rock (as distinct from say draglining a sand or gravel). The thing with this is that times change. Older technology tended to blow great chunks out any-old-how and then smash them up (hard labour for penal establishments). More recent quarrying tends to blast the rock to specific sizes to order - they can even work on the % of dust produced.
Old style blasting produced random chunks that may or may not have to be further broken before being shipped to some form of crushing machine. What went into the machine varied in size from maximum acceptable to powder. What was in the tub/skip/bucket got tipped in and crushed. This produced masses of dust. In a lot of cases dust was was
Old style quarries worked downhill wherever they could. This meant that the structures could tend to be in a line down the slope.
Modern quarries… do all sorts of things! Massive lines of conveyor belts can go over hills for miles… and even straight through them so that what is a hole in the ground one side of a mountain looks like a mine on the other side where the processing plant is set out.
Before modern rubber/fabric conveyor belts there were other belt systems… as far as I have seen these were variations on bucket chains.
For more chunky material bucket chains were and still are used to lift material. Where the material allows it may be shifted with augers at angles or even vertically. Anything that can be fluidised with air tends to get blown from place to place. Both augers and air systems just look like pipes - of various sizes.
“Rock”/aggragate would tend to ride rail in open hoppers. Anything fine/powdered would ride in covered hoppers or pressure loaded cars… the car type.depending on the viscosity of the powder when the air is pumped in. When I was a kid I saw slate powder (used in lots of starnge jobs from making music discs to cosmetics) loaded in old cement cars (Presflos).
Sand is weird stuff… it varies from coral sand to hard stuff that can be used as building blocks. In between there is sticky soft stuff that gets used for mould making. There must be different grades of this last stuff as some of it goes in open truck and rail hoppers while some is moved in pressure loaded tank trucks. The same area also produced a fine freestone that was used for large ornate mantle pieces in big houses. A lot of this sand is mined rather than quarried.
Except for planned-to-be-short-lived operations most crushers and screens get put into large sheds of one kind or another. Old ones probably rough-cut wood or corrugated tin and modern ones steel or plastic cladding. I’m pretty sure that this is as much to keep the dust in an not have to compensate the neighbours as to protect the machines. It will also tend to keep the noise in.
As your following descriptions says a lot of what is to be seen outside the buildings is conveyor belts and stock piles. More dusty stuff gets stockpiled in silos.
I have recalled that I did once see a crusher/screener in the open. It was unusual in that the screen was a number of tapered drums angled a little upwards. I don’t recall if they had blades inside like a concrete mixer.
If someone who can post pics wants to send me an e mail I can send them some pics of a modern facility of steel sheds and conveyors. It’s actually a block works but it’s pretty much the same as most quarries these days.
From the modelling viewpoint there may of course be loads of fuel and/or machinery into a quarry…
another giant quarry and lime/cement operation is Mississippi Lime (might have a new name) at St. Genevieve Mo. they have a huge quarry operation and a plant that crushes and roasts the limestone. it is along us hwy 61 just north and west of town. served by the old MP (M&I) railroad.
i just looked at it on Bing Maps and the bird’s eye view shows over 50 jumbo covered hoppers in the plant. everything is covered with white lime dust. when i worked on the railroad years ago we got a lot of cars out of that place off the TRRA and A&S. they were always covered in white lime dust so bad that it was almost impossible to read the car numbers. eventually the Mopac got smart and they started welding a short piece of steel plate to the side of the car to act like an awning and keep the lime from washing down and obliterating the reporting marks.
talk about an easy weathering project. just swab the car with white shoe polish and streak it downward. even the trucks on those cars were white.
Thanks for all the great information, Dave-the-train I am impressed with your amount of knowledge. I am leaning more toward modeling a gravel quarry that would only supply one type of stone, most likely ballast. The “story” for the industry that I am forming is that of a family owned business with minimal equipment and just enough business to keep the operation going.
Aggregate quarry (model under construction) on Seth Neumann’s layout. It is based on Kaiser’s facilities in Pleasonton, CA. The model looks like it would have sufficient volume to use rail transport.
A quarry would more than likely produce different size finished product. When we set our jaw crusher to 4 inch it produces an infinite size of product up to 4 inches. producers can then screen out the different size material from there. Every product that a small operation produces would be a minus size. That means it is not a consistent size. There will be as example 1and 1/2 inch stone pile would contain some dust up to 1 and 1/2 inch stone. Producers would take advantage of that different size material and screen and wash it to a consistent size finished product. Therefore a small producer providing ballast would also provide some stone dust, 3/8, 1/2, 3/4, 1 1/2, and so on. If there is a particular size product that sells better then others then a size larger would be re-crushed and screened. The quarry I work at produces 3 inch minus. The 1 1/2 inch and 3/4 inch stone sells better then the other sizes. By adding a scalping chute to the 3 inch we can direct the 3 inch stone back to the cone crusher via conveyor to re-crush it to the smaller size that sells better. If you set up your plant to produce one size of finished product what do you do with all the under size? In fact you would be producing more waste than product.
Thanks, the under size stone was something I had not thought of. So if my quarries primary (best selling product) is ballast, there is going to be a sizes smaller than that as well. What would the smaller sized rock be used for and who would want it, the only thing I can think of would be landscapers.
When you refer to ballast do you mean RR track ballast - which is a whole subject in itself - or the generic “ballast” that goes into concrete (which I think is called “aggregate” in the US??)
Either way… everything to big can usually be knocked down to smaller - everything too small can be found a home… if only back in the hole it came out of. Better than that there are all soprts of people who want aggregate in all sorts of sizes for all sorts of jobs.
It does depend on what the rock is and how it breaks up at the smaller end of the scale. Some will only go to dust… but even dust has its uses.
The LSWR’s huge Meldon quarry produced thousands of tone of rail ballast but also a whole load of “Meldon dust” that the railways used for walk ways.
A whole load od roads and parking lots require different grades and sizes of rock that are tipped, profiled and rolled as a sandwich is built up. The top layer of concrete or tar that we see is usually supported on a lot of much less expensive stuff.
Very few rock quarries end up with waste tips… someone is usually looking for material. From the quarries point of view it saves them bother if someone will even take the worst stuff away at their own expense.
Thinking about it slate quarries have spoil tips… and they can be a problem decades later… but that is exceptioanl. In fact even slate can be crunched to powder and sold.
Concrete, Asphalt, road base, stone dust is used for a base for pavers. drainage systems, septic systems, roof shingles, filter products, erosion abatement, roofs of flat top buildings, aggregate enhanced brick and block, exposed aggregate pool and driveways, fill, sand boxes, the list is endless.
Rail road ballast would be a small product line for a producer. Most ballast will outlive the owner of the railroad. Rail road people are cheap by nature and would reuse everything they could and that includes ballast. Ballast cleaners have run the rails as far back as the thirty’s.
Its a great concept. All this dirt in the world and people buy it!
Talk about a useful, timely, thread… I am in the process of building a limestone quarry for my layout! My time period is around 1925. I have searched the internet for many hours to try to find some suitable photos of quarries and equipment from the first part of the lasy century and have pretty much drawn a blank.
Do any of you have (or point me to) photos of quarry operations dating back to that time? Please share!
Thanks for the ideas, it looks like the list of off layout industries is growing.
Ray,
I too have drawn a blank looking for pictures of older mining equipment. But, as a suggestion, I would think any earth moving equipment in your era would be very convincing on your layout. The only draw back would be if your quarry is a big operation. I would assume the bigger the operation the bigger the equipment needed.
Rock, even when blasted isn’t earth. I’m not being pedantic (well not very). Limestone is hard stuff… at least the types used for track ballast are hard to very hard. I think that the stuff used in steel manufacture and cement making is different. Any geologists out there to help us out?
Anyway… for pre war I would look for steam shovels like they used to dig the Panama Canal and work on the big dam projects. Not all the machines they used on those were massive. Generally I would look for a crawler or rail mounted machine with a forward pointing bucket. I doubt that a drag line would be suitable for lifting the rock… although a dragline (or two) might well be used for removing overburden from the top of the quarry… that’s an essential but seperate operation.
In the pre war era there wouldn’t be a lot of heavy trucks to shuttle the rock around. Again look at the Panama canal and the big dam projects. You’ll see lots of temporary track… and on them you’ll see various flats, gons and dump cars… where there’s a lot of dumping to do they are likely to be air dump cars. the harder the rock the more rough-and-tough the car construction. Some cars had two seperate dump bodies on them. This was to avoid too large a body capsizing the whole car… the seperate bodies had to be tipped one at a time.
Another place to look might be both RR construction and grade seperation projects. The work is similar… shifting large amounts of material from one place to another on a short rotation.
Smaller quarries would tend to use narrow gauge (often 3’ in the USA) rather than dump rail use for road wheeled carriers… tyre and probably transmisision technology weren’t up to the rigors of quarry work. Don’t forget that even the oil industry moved a lot of stuff around the oil fields by rail and not by road.