Buzby Brothers Concrete/Cement Plant

[rickb773]

Looking for photo help on a small cement/concrete loading business.

I am currently modeling the Pennsylvania-Reading Seashore Lines through Westville & Woodbury NJ in the 1950s. One of Westville's spurs led to a small concrete/cement loading business called Buzby Brothers. Attached is the only photo I have seen of it (I lived 2 blocks over until the 3rd grade and have only very fuzzy memories of it). This photo was posted on another forum where the discussion was whether it was in Westville or not (it was). The town library has nothing on it and 1 of the Westville Facebook group people thinks they may have had some photos of it but has yet to get around to locating them 1 1/2 years later.

I currently have a grain elevator acting as a very poor stand-in and am building the Walthers Cement Plant but it is also a very poor stand-in.

I was wondering if others have photos of a similar plant that they could share with the forum that would give me a better idea of how these facilities were laid out (and if anyone has a kit for them)?

[Chris333]

According to the map I saw at your blog it was right along Timber creek here:
http://binged.it/LFl2Lg

And if I go to Historical Aerials I can see the plant there.
http://www.historicaerials.com/
The clearest image seems to be 1951, but still hard to see the layout.

[wcfn100]

I'm going to talk out of my a$$ here for a second because I'm just learning some of this myself I might be miles off.

First of all, I think you're looking at a facility that receives cement, not loads it like the Medusa structure.  A couple things that stand out are the overhead hopper (which I think is used to pour measured quantities), and what looks like a crane, which is use for moving aggregate.

In Waterloo there was Shirley Cement.

http://binged.it/NZUfLM

I have pics from the 60's that show the hoppers and cranes (tracks too  ).

Like I said, I could be way off, just thinking out loud.

Jason

[rickb773]

You may be right. Although everyone seems to refer to it as Buzby's, the 1944 town minutes state: "In 1944, a parking lot was put in next to the Borough Hall, the Westville Y.M.C.A. used the park house for meetings, and a gravel, sand & asphalt plant was proposed to built by Busby Bros. on River Drive at Gateway Blvd."

[ljudice]

Doesn't Faller have a kit that might have some of the pieces you need?

http://www.hobbylinc.com/htm/fal/fal222195.htm

[mplsjct]

Doesn't Faller have a kit that might have some of the pieces you need?

http://www.hobbylinc.com/htm/fal/fal222195.htm

That kit is listed as unavailable, which is a shame, those bulk loading containers are needed in N scale.

[conrail98]

N Scale Supply has it listed and not as sold out, http://www.nscalesupply.com/FAL/FAL-Structures.html,

Phil

[ljudice]

There is also this, but I know nothing about it:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/CEMENT-CONSTRUCTION-AG-SPECIAL-MIX-THREE-BULK-HOPPER-SILOS-KIT-N-Scale-/330746545369?pt=Model_RR_Trains&hash=item4d0207c4d9

[wcfn100]

I think that both of those kits are too modern for a 50's setting.

I think what you're dealing with is an early Ready Mix plant.  If so, you can actually take quit a few cues from modern plant as the basic process isn't that much different than 50 years ago.

I think the overhead silo in the pic will be where the trucks are loaded and there's a storage bin maybe for the concrete product and somewhere in there should be a mixer (maybe that lager bin behind the silo).  Aggregate would be on the ground with a crane for loading into a hopper/conveyor. Larger plants may have some sort of reclamation as well.

I suggest searching for "Ready Mix Plants" and then see what you can do to get it more to the period you want.

Jason

[rogergperkins]

If you want to model cement delivery earlier on, say 1930s, I remember my father telling me that my grandfather, who was  a drayman, hauled bags of cement from a boxcar left on a siding to the local lumber yard.  So that is a much smaller scale operation. 
Initially my grandfather has a horse and wagon, thus a teamster; later on he purchased a truck for the business.
 

[jereising]

Had (and worked at, and later owned part of) a block/precast/ready mix plant in my back yard in the fifties.

The main thing required was a three section hopper (sand, gravel, cement) which fed into a scale bin, which then dropped into the mix truck underneath.  There were many forms of this, called a batch plant.  The scale bin weighed precisely each component for repeatability of the mix.

Our first batch plant was fed by a vertical conveyor (buckets on a belt) about 80 feet high (like a grain elevator) which handled the sand and gravel.  The cement was blown from either the hopper car (yes, we had a siding) or truck (think Bulk-Matic) into a separate bin.

Later we added a second batch plant which was fed by a front end loader and again. blown in cement.  This was actually a "portable" batch plant designed for use on the then building interstate system, we converted it to fixed use. 

At first the siding was used but as the business grew and the NYC became less reliable switched to truck.  Hope this helps...

[rickb773]

Thanks guys, this was really helpful. I guess, when I get some money, I will try to get the Faller N scale Concrete Mixing facility since it seems closest to what I need. I almost wish Faller had an N scale version of their HO cement facility.

My next question is how did the 6 covered hoppers (we called them cement hoppers as kids) in the picture deliver the cement? Dump it on the ground and shovel to the silos for mixing and truck delivery?

[jereising]

IIRC we had a separate screw-type conveyor under the tracks to a second bucket elevator going to the top of the storage bin.  That didn't last all that long as air blow technology came along and eliminated a lot of the problems we'd had with that conveyor.  The cement conveyor and bucket elevator were well sealed as opposed to the sand and gravel one  - but moisture had a way of getting in, and when you combine moisture and cement...

We had the block plant on the north side of the track and the ready mix/precast plant on the south side, each had their own conveyors, with the belt under the track being bidirectional.  By the time we put in the mix plant the conversion to air blow had been done so it didn't have a cement conveyor.

[mmagliaro]

EDIT #2 - Reading the blurry text on one scanned page of the article I have, this author didn't scratchbuild it.
He kitbashed it from an IHC/Revell kit.  His was in HO.  I had to scratchbuild mine.

Something virtually identical to that Faller kit was covered as a Model Railroader article as
"Raia" Cement,  with full explanation
of its operation and information on how to kitbash an IHC/Revell HO kit.  I followed that article and built my own from it.

The lead paragraph describes this as a "concrete batch plant".

Here's the MR lead page for the article.  Sorry.  I can't see what year/month it was.


I  took some artistic license with mine.


It's all scratch from styrene.  It's not too hard to build.  One big tip is that those large towers with
the pointed bottoms are made from 1" diameter hollow plastic knitting needles that you can buy at
places like Michael's Crafts or Joanne Fabrics. 

The cement trucks are old Magnuson and GHQ metal kits.  The Magnuson ones are hard to come by these days.
The smaller yellow plastic ones are from some cheap blister pack (I think Bachmann, or maybe Model Power).
With some repainting, and snapping off the wheels and moving them so the trucks at least sit level, they don't
look too bad.

 The sand and gravel are shown in those large wedge-shaped bins
in the MR article. I wanted to be bringing that material in by railroad somehow, so I
put a stand-alone crane.  The idea is that hoppers dump their load onto small conveyors (shown at left more in the background),
which dump the material into piles.  The crane then loads that material into the long covered conveyor
you see, which brings it to the plant.   This gives you an excuse to run covered hoppers in for the cement (like the
MR article does), and other hoppers for stone or sand.

Oh!  (EDIT)  Almost forgot.  I think in the old article, they explain that the covered hoppers unloaded the cement with a blower.
The way the article describes the towers, there are pipes that lead right down to where the coverer hoppers unload.
I didn't think they dumped their material anywhere.

Some of it ain't prototypical, and sure, unloading using small portable conveyors into piles probably isn't
completely sensible or the best way for them to do it.  But it makes for a nice busy scene with bull dozers and loaders, so
I decided to not be a nitpicker and just enjoy it.

[rickb773]

Nice work!
And thanks for the information. Let me know if you ever run across the issue date. Thanks.