Mining Equipment on the Move

Here are cars carrying a feeder, stamps for a stamp mills, the camshaft for the mill, a retort, crusher and Wilfley table base.

The well car with 20-foot gear. The bottom of the gear extends below the car deck, almost to the rails to provide enough clearance for the tunnels. The second car carries a steam engine frame while the third car carried the rest of the engine parts plus its flywheels.

I like loads on flat cars. With the railroad bringing goods to the gold rush country, it seems logical that some of this heavy equipment would show up on flat cars on the S&C. I had an old kit made by Western Scale Models which represented such a load of various types of mining equipment. I finally decided to put the thing together and place them on a couple of flat cars. The original plan of the kit maker was that everything would fit on two 40-foot flats. When you're using 30-foot flats, the load takes up three cars. Adding in the steam engine load from American Model Builders increases the train to 5 cars. When I had gotten this far, I realized that I had to build one of my favorite loads, a 20-foot diameter gear on a well car. This particular load was copied from 1875 newspaper articles and an photo of the car. So now we have a six-car train which, due to the gear (which barely clears the tunnel portals), will have to operate very slowly, not exceeding, say, 10 mph. We'll see how that weaves in with the other traffic on the line.

   

This overview of Milton shows the Tornado Hotel at the left along with a barn which is a stand-in for a livery stable and blacksmith shop to be built. The Masonic Lodge is in the center with the town stretching behind it. Alongside the tracks are the various warehouses and freight forwarders. A corral will be on this side of the tracks along with a turntable to be at the right just out of the picture.

Here is another photo of Milton which I wanted to include in the last post. I think it shows the town in a better view. As I mentioned, I still need a few structures and a turntable to round things out.