Prototype photos of concrete batch plant?

Go to Google Earth, Type in one of these two places.

Union Bridge Maryland, Zoom in and you cannot miss it. It is nothing more than a gigantic bunch of bins that stored concrete brought in by the Maryland Midland (VERY close to the old buried rail of the PRR Walkersville Line) and the WM before that I think almost to 1900.

The second place to visit in Google Earth is Lime Kiln Maryland. It is near Frederick. There you have yet more cement shipped.

Finally Portland Cement was made at a facility called Capitol I think near Martinsburg WVa. That was a very large facility.

And you can try to visit Canton and get down into the Harbor area and visit Grace. You will see a very large bin next to the dock with a gigantic network of pipe. They literally pipe in the powder off the ship and load into truck or rail. Mostly truck.

Finally but not last. Lehigh Cement is off truck and export to ship I think or little trucks for the area. Not sure... They are in the Harbor across from Ft McHenry.

There are other places around the nation that was essentially a large hole in the ground that we ants have been picking at since Colonial Times. One in particular features a several hundred yard bridge made of a 10 foot wide wall between TWO quarries where you would sign your waiver plus last will and testament before being allowed to exit following the 8 inch wide yellow line painted for your left front steer tire to stay on while ignoring everything else until you make it across or not.

The rest of it is usually batch plants that take in cement, stone and sand off semi trucks and mix it with fibers, additives and so on along with huge quantities of water to make... CONCRETE!

Yes, I spent time in the industry. My favorite work was to feed a hopper of sand and rock with a CAT 936 wheeled loader. It's just like play time, not a job.

Lime was a side job to Cement. Bittenger PA comes to mind. A quarry there has been feeding the Steel at Sparrows Point for decades. I don't know if they finally ran out of space to dig deeper.

As far as making the stuff, you had a portable office, a large air pump, a batch mixer and a few conveyor belts along with a liquid tank or three and a silo for cement, another for fly ash (Taken from Coal Fired Power plants) and a pile of sand, a dallop of stone and presto! batch plant.

The biggest difference really is the amount of yardage. In the 60's maybe a few yards. Today up to 12 yards and more in specialized trucks out west could be done.

As a side note, we hauled as much on the little ready mix as possible. that 10 yard capacity tank can be used to fit 11 and change as long you did not drip any behind you on the road below. Mr Smokey Bear will not appreciate that too much.

We had a few 100 yard days. Grissom TX poured a Cross Base that required 6 separate batch plants 24/7 to finish a pour quickly.

Hoover Dam required cooling on a large scale to cure quickly otherwise it would be a century before you could use the thing.

My two cents or three. The stuff goes all the way back to Roman Times.

Here's my Cement block plant pictures. The cement towers are made of 1-1/2" and 2" plastic pipe and stryene. The hopper for the sand and rock is a connection made of a downcomer tube from a plastic rain gutter. The belt system is a HO kit. In the bottom picture you can see the towers to the cement plant and the blue building cover for the loading of the cement covered hopper cars.

Tony, if you live out in western OK or the Texas Panhandle go to any of the oil well cement company yards. Most at one time or another had a railroad spur to unload cement hopper cars.  In northwest Arkansas the A&M railroad hauls sand to most of the cement plants from the Arkansas river. The rock is mined near by and the cement is trucked in from the cement plants on the northeast side of Tulsa. I built the block plant due to I did not have room to build a yard for the redymix trucks and the piles of rock and sand.

The exact plant you are looking for was described in an article in Railroad Model Craftsman magazine, Nov. 1980 issue, pages 89-94. Many photos and drawings with dimensions.

Jeff

Tony Wright, Thank you for your insight to your remembering. It was a good learning for me.

I recall a small operation near a town that is not really worth being a town. It was simply two spur tracks off a main and there they had hopper cars of various grades of stone and gravel.

Dump trucks would drive in and get some when they needed stone in a pinch. I've taken a Dodge flatbed in once or twice and loaded up with 12,000 pounds once or twice.

Gee, that old Dodge ran well considering. They just don't build em that good anymore.

I also forgot totally about the new Interstate system being built under Eisenhower starting with the PA turnpike and others (Ohio perhaps?) they would bring cement to a rolling set of equipment that would literally mix and pour it onto the ground for a new road once it's cured and cut. Some of those equipments were sometimes on wheels and established in a temporary location when a very large interchange or high way was needed to be built.

You will find those in the 50's and 60's photos out there.