I’m modeling St. Louis & vicinity in HO around 1960. South of St. Louis is an area known as the “Lead Belt”, which still has operating lead mines and smelters, and plenty residual pollution. I would be interested to know how lead ore was transported from the mines to the smelters, and how lead was then transported from the smelters to customers. This area has (or had) enough lead activity that I would have assumed some industry specific rolling stock, similar perhaps to UP Michigan taconite cars, but I don’t remember ever seeing a “lead car”.
i must step into the “way back” machine on that one. st louis was once a major paint manufacturing center too and that industry used a lot of lead.
your questions are about an era that is a little early for me but i do remember Doe Run lead going east on the PC and CR in trailers. the trailers originated in Herculaneum Mo and moved east on flats cars from Rose Lake intermodal facility. i think Mopac truck lines and Freight Express were the drayage companies that brought these loads to us.
best i can recall, the ingots had “wings” or bottom slots that a forklift could get under to move them.
insuficient blocking was a big problem for a while and we had to inspect every one of those loads. once a lead ingot got loose inside a trailer, it was going to try it’s best to come through the side or doors if it could.
i imagine the box car shipments were the same type of ingot with wooden blocking nailed to the car floor but i never looked at any of those. maybe some of the MOPAC types out there can shed some more light on this for you. (if they haven’t all been dipped in yellow paint and shipped off to Omaha) car load shipments originating that far south of town were not on the switching district so MP was the original line haul carrier and did the billing.
Lead mining is done in conjunction with zinc, silver, and copper mining, either as a joint product or a byproduct. A pure-lead mine is rare/nonexistent. Other important byproducts can include fertilizer ingredients as indicated in this photo of the Mococo smelter whose primary purpose was to smelt copper. The Southern Pacific moved the ore using general service (drop-bottom) gondolas, but that (gondola versus hopper) was mostly a Western railroad thing. The smelter was located at the west end, south shore of Suisun Bay. The SP named its Mococo Martinez/Tracy line after the smelter.
Not all lead mining was done in conjunction with other ores. The Galena lead deposits of SW Wisconsin supplied a lot of the lead shot for the Civil War. There were large zinc deposits there, but until later the zinc was considered part of the waste. Zinc mining did follow the decline in lead, and several large operations(NJ Zinc/Mineral Point Zinc/Eagle-Pitcher) have operated out of the area.
The Mineral Point Railroad moved ore south to the Illinois Central until purchased by the Milwaukee Road. Most pictures show lead ore in composite gondolas. The later zinc operation had zinc smelters/float operations. The zinc was moved via truck to railhead on the IC(the old Mineral Point trackage was long gone).
On my ‘proto-fictional’ Milwaukee branch, I ship refined zinc in 2 bay covered hoppers, and old ‘mine waste’ tailings in open hoppers to a processing plant in Illinois.
Thank you for the replies everyone. I would have thought lead ore would be very heavy, like iron ore, requiring special equipment. Perhaps the lead component of the ore is a small percentage however. I am not surprised that ingots are shipped in box cars, along with a lot of air, as they are so heavy!
And the primary business of Missouri lead belt mines is lead, with other elements of secondary consideration.
Paul Larson’s Mineral Point & Northern layout modeled this general area - it was often featured in Model Railroader in the late fifties when he was editor; I think his modeled era was after the lead mines had more or less played out.
By the way, to further Jim’s observation, when south western Wisconsin was an active lead mining area, the area of the diggings was so heavily worked that it looked like badgers had dug into the many hills of what is known as the driftless area of Wisconsin (meaning the glaciers had not made it flat as a pancake). The lead mining holes are why Wisconsin is known as the Badger State.
I attended college down in Platteville WI, at the heart of the former lead mining country of Wisconsin. Those holes got blamed for everything, since no good maps existed of them.
The stories, apocraphial or not, were rich. The addition to the engineering hall was sinking because they found an open shaft and tunnel under a portion, random sheet steel plates in front yards to cap mine shafts, etc.
If you call the mining museum in Platteville they have a very good collection of materials that they can root through (read they get on of the history interns to do it) for any other information you might want.
Bill: I noted with interest that your modeling the St. Louis area. I am currently modeling E. St. Louis in the same time period. I suggest you check out the TRRA website for periodicals that can be purchased that are helpful for that area. For my layout I scratchbuilt a number of interlocking towers that were located in the greater E, St. Louis area. To see photos of them check out my Facebook website. Key words are model trains, train sets, buildings and Layout Concepts. Yours,