Can someone tell me what BL's hoppers look like without the coal loads, and if there are weights inside then can they be removed? I run unit train coal hoppers without the loads, filling them with coal at the loaders and then dumping them. Although many manufacturers have hoppers that have removable loads, in many cases the loads hide ugly car weights that can't be removed without scarring the car.
I'm uncertain, but Broadway's website reads "Detailed Bay Interiors" and "Realistic Removable Coal Loads" on the H2a's. I'm with you on loads. They're nice, but I also like the authentic look and operational aspect of empties being moved back to the mines. I load and dump my hoppers too. I love the look of dirty car interiors, the weight of a loaded train and working the power required to move it, vs a light train of empties. Just like the prototype.
Thanks much @Larry E Shankles! I've bid on the cars. @Hardcoaler, I agree 100% about how we have to deal with real prototype issues when we do this. I have to check a list of how many loaded cars of each type that each engine can pull before making a run. And nothing says "be careful" like taking a train full of coal back from the mine. Here's a quick video of one of my trains loading and unloading: Do you have any pics of your setup that you can share?
Oh, that is VERY cool -- I have never seen anything like that. Thanks for posting this! Are you a Mechanical Engineer? If not, you should be. If I tried building something like that, it'd take a decade and most of my coal would end up on the floor. In the early 1980's an N Scale supplier named State Street Models briefly produced a car dumper kit. I'm not sure what it looked like, but I'm betting that it was a McMyler as made famous by the CNJ. I have a video of a film produced by the railroad called The Big Little Railroad that shows a McMyler in action. A Pleasant Sight -- It's Anthracite! https://abandonednyc.com/2016/02/11/port-readings-mcmyler-coal-dumper/
Thanks guys! The loader and the dumper are scratch built. Plenty of coal has indeed hit the floor in the layout room. Engineer yes but Software, not mechanical. But as far as I'm concerned the more moving parts the better. I do have the State Stream Models dumper alive and running on the layout, and in fact that is what got me started in moving coal. I found it at Northwest Hobbies in Chicago and thought it was so cool because the kickback track was the closest thing to a roller coaster that you could find on a railroad layout. Everything else grew from that little kernel of an impulse purchase. The State Street model is not a McMyler, but I would absolutely love to get a McMyler working in N scale like this one:
I didn't live far from Port Reading, New Jersey where the Reading's coal dumper operated. I had the chance to see it in action with larger hoppers, including the kickback track. What's left of the dumper is still in place, sadly, it was abandoned and then badly damaged by Superstorm Sandy. It's 'story' is told in the film "Rebuilding the Reading Car Dumper" which was briefly available on VHS. I have a copy of that tape in storage.
That must have been an extraordinary project to plan. My Big Little Railroad tape is a Betamax tape! Though I digitized it in the dying days of my Sony Betamax player.
There are plenty of dumpers around but the kickback track setup seems to be disappearing. Norfolk Southern has a double dumper with kickback at their Lamberts Point facility in Norfolk, and CSX has one at their Toledo dock facility. There are some pretty good videos of these on youtube - but a lot of the Lamberts point videos are put out by environmental groups that focus on the coal dust.
