Scratchbuild an HO scale coal dealer
The retaining bands around the silos (above) required some experimentation. The drawing belowshows how they were laid out. The author found that making a re- cess on and rounding the edges of styrene channel, then cementing pieces onto the overlapped ends of the styrene rod used for the bands, looked a lot like the fittings used to secure the sections of rod, just as on this old wooden water pipe (left).
Silo band assembly
improvised industries is Dunellen Coal and Lumber. While there was such a company at the corner of Washington Avenue and North Street, quite near the Dunellen passenger station, it had an elevated coal dump, the approach to which would have eaten up too much layout space. I instead decided to build a com- pany that sold coal from concrete coal silos. Not only are these silos interest- ing structures, they would also help hide the fact that the layout rails end abruptly at a wall. Sargent Brothers Coal, in nearby Somerville, New Jersey, had a row of six silos that I had long wanted to mod- el, having gone to and graduated from Somerville High School in 1967. The si- los are long gone, but I have one photo of a CNJ GP40P departing Somerville station with the silos off to the left side of the picture. Sargent Brothers’ six si- los were arranged with a space the size of one silo between silos four and five. Perhaps this is where the bucket eleva- tor was located, I simply don’t know, but I always liked the large letters “C- O-A-L” neatly painted one letter per silo with the company name on the gambrel roof panels. Following Harold W. Russell’s article,
“A concrete-block coal silo,” that ap- peared in the March, 1982, issue of Model Railroader, I scratchbuilt a set of four silos for my freelanced Dunellen Coal and Lumber Company. Such coal silos were once common in many parts of the country, and they shared many characteristics. Follow along: these si- los are relatively simple to build, even with lots of scratchbuilt details.
50 Silo construction
The basis for these silos is two-inch diameter PVC pipe. Since I had just put a basement bathroom in our house, I had plenty of leftover pipe. I cut four, six-inch lengths of pipe, being careful to keep the ends square. These scale out at a bit over 43 feet in height with a diameter of approximately 17 feet. (If you were going to build poured con- crete silos, you would be almost done now.) The silos were built of curved concrete block, the blocks measuring 2′-6″ long by 1′-0¹⁄₂″ high. They fit to- gether in a tongue and groove fashion with no mortar in the joints and were held together by ¹⁄₂″-diameter steel rods spaced 10″ to 15″ apart over the entire height of the silo. To simulate silo block I used Ever- green .020″ thick,
.125″-spaced V-
groove siding. Since the circumference of 2″ PVC pipe is very close to seven and a half inches (actual), I had to edge-glue two sheets of siding together, then cut them to the correct width. On my first, and what turned out to be my test silo, I scribed alternating grooves between the V-grooves of the siding 30 scale inches apart to simulate the indi- vidual blocks. Not only did that take a long time to do, after I had applied the bands around the silo, most of the scribing was covered. For the bands that wrap around the
silo, I used Evergreen .020″ styrene rod. There are a couple of ways to apply the bands–and there are a lot of them. On my silos there are 38 bands from bottom to top. On the test silo, I laid out the band spacing on the flat V- groove siding, then glued the 12″ long,
.020″ rod directly to pencil lines with liquid styrene cement applied with a small paint brush. This goes relatively quickly, but you need two packages of the Evergreen rod per silo, and you need to use the cut-off portions of the rod, as well.
Where these pieces of rod met, I bent about one scale foot of the ends to a slight angle, one up and one down. The ends of the prototype bands were joined together by special connectors and overlapped a little. The ends of the bands were threaded, and nuts held them in the connectors. My test silo ended up with very few connectors, and they were randomly placed. Prototypi- cally, each silo band would have been made up from three or four ¹⁄₂″ diame- ter bars, so there would have been a like number of connectors spaced around the silo circumference. While these connectors could have been locat- ed at random, I’ve seen photos of old si- los (including farm silos) with the con- nectors either aligned vertically or staggered around the circumference. I like the look of that, which was one of the reasons my first silo became a test piece.
Another reason my first silo became the test piece is that a sub-assembly of more than thirty .020″ diameter styrene rods glued to .020″ V-groove siding becomes rather stiff when you try to bend it around 2″ PVC pipe. Moreover, regular liquid model cement for styrene isn’t strong enough to hold the siding to the pipe, so I used PVC pipe cleaner, which is a combination of methyl ethyl ketone, acetone, and oth- er noxious and hazardous chemicals.
JUNE 2013
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