the train layout, but after reading all the nice comments following "the Cat came back", I am unable to fit my head through the door of this room.
This is a little something I built over 30 years ago. It was originally to be one of two for a model of one of the blast furnaces at the steel plant where I worked. I had copies of the pertinent blueprints from the engineering department and managed to construct the furnace shell, most of the cast house, and the skip bridge and buckets for charging the furnace. The cranes were for inside the cast house. Except for the furnace shell, construction was mostly basswood shapes, since there wasn't much available in the way of styrene. The project gobbled up my model railroading allowance and it soon dawned on me that it would also gobble up the room in our one bedroom apartment: the cast house alone covered over 10 square feet, and there would still be a stock house (1' X 4'), stoves (18" X 3'), and gas scrubbers and baghouses (3' X 4') required. I shelved the project, and over time, broke most of it up for other uses. Some was given away and all that remains is a few large roof trusses and this crane. Since I didn't have blueprints for the crane, other than overall dimensions, I based the model on a composite of two cranes in the department where I worked, since both were accessible.
The bridge, trolley, and cab are sheet styrene, with structural shapes of basswood. The motors, gearboxes, pillow blocks, and electrical cabinets are all scratchbuilt. The handrails, other than a few that were broken in storage and replaced when I decided to build this scene, are basswood angle, as are the collector rails for the trolley. As best I recall, the only commercial parts are the bearing caps on the trolley wheels (from a model of a Russian tank) and the rail on the bridge (steel).
The new crane runway is styrene, mostly Evergreen shapes, with a piece of an Atlas girder over the oil house. The runway rail is more steel, leftover from the original project. The shop building is a Vollmer 3 stall roundhouse, rebuilt square and added-on to. The turntable seen in another post is on the opposite end of this view.
As you can see in the background of some of the pictures, there's lots of unfinished layout still to do: the position for my hopefully soon-to-come second level can be seen in the distant background and there's a lot of naked hillsides requiring trees (off to the left, with one end visible of the last bridge on the way to the second level).
Hope you enjoy viewing this:
I hope this isn't hogging too much space, but it's a difficult scene to photograph.
Wayne
This is a little something I built over 30 years ago. It was originally to be one of two for a model of one of the blast furnaces at the steel plant where I worked. I had copies of the pertinent blueprints from the engineering department and managed to construct the furnace shell, most of the cast house, and the skip bridge and buckets for charging the furnace. The cranes were for inside the cast house. Except for the furnace shell, construction was mostly basswood shapes, since there wasn't much available in the way of styrene. The project gobbled up my model railroading allowance and it soon dawned on me that it would also gobble up the room in our one bedroom apartment: the cast house alone covered over 10 square feet, and there would still be a stock house (1' X 4'), stoves (18" X 3'), and gas scrubbers and baghouses (3' X 4') required. I shelved the project, and over time, broke most of it up for other uses. Some was given away and all that remains is a few large roof trusses and this crane. Since I didn't have blueprints for the crane, other than overall dimensions, I based the model on a composite of two cranes in the department where I worked, since both were accessible.
The bridge, trolley, and cab are sheet styrene, with structural shapes of basswood. The motors, gearboxes, pillow blocks, and electrical cabinets are all scratchbuilt. The handrails, other than a few that were broken in storage and replaced when I decided to build this scene, are basswood angle, as are the collector rails for the trolley. As best I recall, the only commercial parts are the bearing caps on the trolley wheels (from a model of a Russian tank) and the rail on the bridge (steel).
The new crane runway is styrene, mostly Evergreen shapes, with a piece of an Atlas girder over the oil house. The runway rail is more steel, leftover from the original project. The shop building is a Vollmer 3 stall roundhouse, rebuilt square and added-on to. The turntable seen in another post is on the opposite end of this view.
As you can see in the background of some of the pictures, there's lots of unfinished layout still to do: the position for my hopefully soon-to-come second level can be seen in the distant background and there's a lot of naked hillsides requiring trees (off to the left, with one end visible of the last bridge on the way to the second level).
Hope you enjoy viewing this:
I hope this isn't hogging too much space, but it's a difficult scene to photograph.
Wayne
