Walther's New River Mining Company

[Chris333]

The "real" photos are of a strip mine at the top of the hill. There is a truck dump up there and the conveyors run down to the tipple.

[wm3798]

I built my tipple for Chaffee from scratch.  The mine head is an old Heljan coaling tower.



Lee

[Norm P]

I grew up in eastern Ky., so I was surrounded by the coal industry and my father was a construction foreman for a coal company.  Among the above-ground structures he built were tipples, also called loadouts or flood loaders, where the unit trains were loaded before being taken to the prep. plant for cleaning, sizing, etc.  I have a scrapbook of photos he took of projects he supervised in the early to mid 80s.  If any of you guys modeling the modern era coal haulers want to look at some of the photos I can put them on photbucket or somewhere like that.  I have some of them uploaded to a yahoo group already.

Interestingly, in the appalachian railroading website that N&W posted, there is a page dealing with my dad's coal company, Southeast Coal Co. (SECX) and its relation to the railroads.  In a nutshell they owned their own motive power and hoppers and L&N provided the crews.  Pretty interesting concept.  I haven't visited the website in about six months, but I think there were some photos from a layout which includes motive power from the company.

Edit: I just checked, the homepage has a photo of Robby Vaughn's layout with some of the SECX engines passing a prep plant in the county where I was raised.

Norm

[CVSNE]

I know John Drye had an article on kitbashing the Walthers mine into a Pennsy coal field tipple in a recent issue of Model Railroader (within the last two years).  I cannot find a reference to it on the MR Index of Magazines page, but I know he built the model, wrote the article, and it was published.

the model itself was reduced to a pile of molten plastic when John's house burned down last year, and I know he plans to rebuild the model following his own article!

Marty

[Dave V]

I know John Drye had an article on kitbashing the Walthers mine into a Pennsy coal field tipple in a recent issue of Model Railroader (within the last two years).  I cannot find a reference to it on the MR Index of Magazines page, but I know he built the model, wrote the article, and it was published.

the model itself was reduced to a pile of molten plastic when John's house burned down last year, and I know he plans to rebuild the model following his own article!

Marty

Oh, crap, I'm sorry to hear that!  I didn't know!  That's too bad, really...  The layout can be replaced, but heck, he had some nice locos, including one of the Kato/GHQ Mike kitbashes (those are not exacty fun to put together)...

Hopefully the new layout will let him broaden those curves a bit.  I remember looking at the plan and wondering what he had to do to that Mike to get it to make an 11" curve; mine had to be modified to make 13.5" without shorting out!

[CVSNE]

Actually most of his brass was upstairs in the living room on bookcases along the front wall, which didn't burn. Worst part was the heat of the fire fused the plastic and foam to the paint on the models.

Marty

[bsoplinger]

I know John Drye had an article on kitbashing the Walthers mine into a Pennsy coal field tipple in a recent issue of Model Railroader (within the last two years).  I cannot find a reference to it on the MR Index of Magazines page, but I know he built the model, wrote the article, and it was published.

If someone can post the details of this bash I'd like to look it up. MR is not one of the mags I tend to get or even to pick up to look at. At my LHS its mostly just N-scale, NSR, RMC, RMJ and Classic Trains for me with the occasional issue of the magazine TRP (The Railroad Press) puts out. Did get Mainline Modeler but that one is gone