Alan,
A power plant can exemplify the combination of new and old facilities on a common site and for a common purpose. Many power plants operate for 50 years or more with improvements and additions made to them through their life. I would also note that there is great variety among the features of power plants through time and between utilities. I was the maintenance superintendent in a power plant where the initial phase of the plant was placed into service in 1927. The plant is still there today and it is an eclectic, congested combination of facilities of every era from its beginning to the present time. Your project captures the spirit of many plants built through the 1930s and 1940s with subsequent improvements.
The addition of your coal tipple alongside the older ramp merely illustrates that the plant management is modernizing its facilities and setting itself up to use modern rotary dump cars in unit trains while continuing to also be able to use traditional methods of delivery from existing suppliers.
With regard to the tipple's location on a lower level, for a plant built on flat ground the tipple would have normally have been built in an excavation so that the trackage would have gone straight through. The use of a ramp up to the tipple as illustrated in Lionel’s catalogs would not have been typical. My plant was built on the high natural bank of the Mississippi River above the adjoining flood plain. Since the plant was natural gas fired, we did not have any coal handling facilities. We did have facilities built at a lower level on the flood plain including cooling towers and water treating facilities. This included a timber trestle for access to a water intake caisson on the edge of the river and support of water intake pipes. If the plant had burned coal it would have been logical for docks, conveyors and coal stock piles to be located at a lower level in the flood plain similar to your tipple and your ramp. The approach you have taken to illustrate a break in the contour of the land and show the features of the tipple is quite consistent with the action of any plant operator where such a feature of the terrain is available.
Although a conventional cooling tower will be significantly smaller than a natural draft parabolic tower, a cooling tower of any sort will be quite large, at least the size of the Korber building if not more. You could use once through cooling by river water. Many plants particularly older ones did not have cooling towers when adjacent to bodies of water. I think you did a nice job representing aspects of any number pf plant of the steam era through at least the seventies.
An interesting note: startup power for my plant was originally (in 1927) provided by a steam locomotive from the adjacent Illinois Central freight yard and at least through the seventies the plant had no alternative method of startup even though steam locomotion was dead. The plant was of necessity very reliable and had only one shut down in its first fifty years of operation.
Nice job with the combination of the old and the new and the location of the tipple on a lower step.
Pat B.
