A while ago I purchased on eBay some of the Minton Cronkhite's Chicago Museum of Science & Industry's layout buildings. It took sometime to incorporate some of the building into my layout. Finally, I am setting up MC's mining and refining buildings. I intend on labeling the building "Minton & Cronkhite Mining & Refining, Co.
I have attached some pictures of the building placement on the layout.
There are two structures; the first is the raw ore processing buildings and the second is the refining part that takes the ore and melts it down into ingots. The elevated line goes into a mine shaft to the left. There will be a dumping chute that leads to the raw ore into processing facility.
The openings in the two buildings had conveyers that moved the raw ore from the ore processor to the refining building; I need to rebuild those.
I was looking for O-gauge Ingots and finally found eight(8) on eBay. The HO versions looked too small. The MC buildings were constructed to be viewed from a distance which is a kind way to say that they are not well detailed. So keeping that in mind, I was going to use On3 trackage, engines, dump cars and ingot buggies; again to be viewed from a distance.
The raw ore On3 dump cars were located but the ingot buggies need to be constructed. Because of the space limitations, the refining building will be raised over the tracks that carry the ingot buggies. The idea is that the processed ore will be poured into the ingots below. Then the ingots will be moved out in the buggies to a crane that hoists the ingots into waiting O-gauge Ingot gondolas.
The buggies use On3 ( actually HO) trucks and couplers; I am fabricating the pieces now for assembly and painting. Inside the red box are the buggy bases, couplers, trucks and coupler/wheel supports.
see mock-up of a buggy below on PECO On30 C100 flex track with wooden tiles. Although I may wind up using track with Concrete ties that don't char. Once I have these completed I will show in another threat . . . cont.
