Tuesday, May 5, 2009

HIGH LINE Part 1



I haven't been doing a whole lot of modeling for a week or so - I've been under the weather and then my teenage daughter needed emergency surgery.  Tonight she returned home, doing fine but in some pain, and I'm just starting to get over my sinus cold.  It was also the first night in a while that I felt like going down to my workbench and modeling.  I shift gears a little and started work on the high-line.  For you non-steel people, the high-line is basically an elevated railroad used to fill many separate storage bins located beneath the high line with the essentials for fueling blast furnaces - iron ore, coke, and limestone.  Under these bins is a sunken railroad track that has a scale car on it.  This scale car receives materials from the bins and transports them to the skip hoist and thence into the blast furnace.   I will be modeling pretty closely the prototype high-line used at Bethlehem Steel.  On this line, the inner track is standard gauge and the outer is dual gauge (standard and 5')   The wide gauge track was used for special cars used to transport the ore at Bethlehem.   I am not sure if I am going to model dual gauge or just stick with standard on both tracks.  I also won't be modeling the scale cars or line under the high-line.    What you see is the first four, of very many bins that will make up my high-line.  The bins are made of .040 styrene with wide flange beams between (3/16x 1) supported by 3/16 H-Columns.   The structure still needs a framework to carry the rails, made from 5/16 I-beams.   

No comments: