Missoula Coal and Transfer Structure Height?

[hegstad1]

Another photo of the coal dock from the opposite side. Maybe the rail cars can provide a reference for the dimensions.

Great picture! I've never seen that one.

[hegstad1]

[Chris333]

No trestle... how revolting 

[draskouasshat]

55-60ft would be my guess, most likely 60 as that's looks to be taller than a 55' signal pole when I had to climb a couple.

Drasko

[wazzou]

I'd agree it's closer to 60' than 35'.

[hegstad1]

I made a paper mock-up that came out to just over a scale 50'.  It will be a bit higher with a proper concrete foundation.

[wazzou]

Great picture! I've never seen that one.

I think you could make a layer of that gon, rotate it 90* and get you're height pretty accurate.

[sirenwerks]

A  Model A is 7 1/2' tall.

But I'm pretty sure the car on the left, closer and next to the structure, is a model T, which is 6' 8 3/4" tall.

[mmagliaro]

I think your mock-up is too tall.
Measuring again off your original photo, with that model T at the base of it being about 70" tall, it is about 23' to top of the first wall (at the bottom of the sloping roof that slopes down away from the "MISSOULA COAL & TRANSFER CO" sign.)

Drawings of some 1940's pickup trucks I found show cab heights around 75".  So in your model photo, that makes that same dimension up to the lower edge of the sloping roof  about 30'. 

Admittedly, I had to draw various parallel and perspective lines to get a fix on how tall that truck would be if it were right against the wall of your building.  But I think it's too high.

[Cajonpassfan]

Respectfully, I disagree with the latest estimate (assuming I understand it correctly). If the sidewall below the lower eave were only 23' high, the ladder rungs I noted in Repply #4 would be only about 12" or less on center. That is certainly possible (although unlikely), but that would give the four guys really tiny heads 
No, I think Andrew's mockup is pretty close to the real thing. Now if we can get him to post progress pics...
Otto

[mmagliaro]

Otto, I thought about this.  One thing I thought about that ladder is that those rungs look very closely spaced to me.  I could find 12" spacing more believable than 16".  But either way, I don't see how that makes the guys' heads tiny.  They are standing a good distance away from those ladder rungs.  It's hard to compare their head size to the rung spacing.

Based on an average male height of 5'7-1/2" in 1920 (I looked it up), that makes that shed they are standing in front of 11'3" tall.  That seems reasonable to me.  It looks to be about twice the height of the men in the photo.  And going up the corner of the building behind the shed, that gives me about 24' to the lower eave.  Even if the building is 12' tall (say it's more likely to be a round number), that would put the eave around 25'.

I really think the key is the height of that car parked at the base of the trestle support.  It's right next to the trestle leg, so we don't have much perspective error when scaling from the car height to the trestle height.  If somebody could positively identify that car model, it would help. I guessed at 70" based on some 1920s car drawings I looked at, but I am not sure what that car is.

[Cajonpassfan]

Well Max, I guess we "see" differently. I see the guys  closer to the camera than the ladder bent, and I see the heads fitting easily between the rungs. With a hat on, I'd say 12" vertical is about right for the average head, although I didn't check that for 1920's
But even using the car next to the far bent for scale (and that's a bit problematic because we don't know the size of the car and because the back of it is closer to the camera making the car relatively bigger) I get about 6.4 car heights to the top of the bent. Or 6.7? correcting for location relative to the bent. So if the car is 6' tall for easy math, I'm pretty close to 40' to the top of the bent. And the car looks pretty big to me, again relative to the four men, it could easily  be taller than 6'. Or, I could be all wet...
Otto

[hegstad1]

You guys are awesome!!

So what did we decide on?  52'3 5/16"?

I'll alter my drawings

[hegstad1]

Another question.  How high do you think the chutes are from the ground?

[hegstad1]

Never mind.