GLASS PLANT - Part 4

With the precipitator complex occupying my main workbench.  Things came to a stop saturday night when I ran out of .020x.040 styrene to build railings.   I'm remiss to move this thing around too much at this point as it's close to being done and I almost dropped it the last time I carried it around.   It will have to wait until I can pick up some plastic.  In the meantime I dusted off the Glass Plant project and started working on that again.

When we left off, very early this year, I had just finished the foundation and the basic silo and silo roofs were cut.  But first, as promised, the prototype photo

Batch Plant, storage silos.

Since my last work on this model, I've decided to model the batch plant silos as shown here, with the center elevator structure.  This is a new configuration, and originally these silos were loaded using two traveling elevators.  The the remains for the brackets that held the rail for the top roller of these elevators  are visible near the top of each silo.  With this former setup, the materials arrived in boxcars and cable drawn scrapers or plows were used to push the material into the hopper of the traveling elevator.   With this system, the cars were spotted in front of the silos that they were filling.   Eventually, probably with the advent of covered hoppers, the method of loading these silos was changed to a central fixed elevator and a variety of chutes and conveyors to fill the six silos.   At this time, the rail siding was raised to facilitate the bottom discharging of the covered hoppers.   The siding is also on an incline, just like mine tipples, so spotted cars can be moved using gravity during the unloading process.  As this is for a model railroad and it's tough to spot model cars on sloped rails, I will model everything level.

new foundation - cut down old

With this newer version of the batch plant, the foundation became partially buried.  Actually it isn't a foundation, but more of a underground track for the scale/batch prep car  which does the same thing as the scale car that runs under the high line in a steel mill.   So I cut down the foundation that I had already made on the table saw.

Silos glued on

Once cut I permanently affixed the silos to the foundation, making sure that the 18 panel roofs all were oriented the same way.   To do that I drew a center line down the top of the foundation and then, using a modelers miter box placed upside down on the pipe that formed the silo, I extended a perpendicular line down the side, on both sides of each silo.  Then, it's just a matter of matching up the lines and gluing.  Using some strip from the scrap box I created ties between the tops of the silo.  The trestle for the conveyor will mount on these ties.  I also cut and fit the foundation of the loading area and the materials dump was a left over part from a Walthers kit.