@Stephane Savard FANTASTIC job and nice progress! I like your weathering of the mine roof. BTW, you work way too neat!
Nice work! There's prototypes for chemical plants being built right next to mountains and rivers, such as Institute, WV: https://maps.app.goo.gl/ZbfnoPJTXU2j8wWh8. I would suggest adding a ton of piping between the facilities and tanks. I think you have a great little facility growing on the hill! I'm a HAZMAT nerd and think this is great! You could go hog wild and build that whole area up as a chemical shipper. Got lots of tank cars?
Thank you all! I might still do so a little bit, it really is a tight squeeze, but your prototype picture doesn't make it out too bad, kinda looks neat to have the corners butchered like that! It's probably why building anything takes me so long LOL, I can't stand a messy workspace! Yes! I want a lot of piping from the tanks, all going into the garage, and I'll have a platform for filling tank cars between the two tracks, got to have lots of piping to that too. Can't see it in the picture, but I engraved some piping onto the bottom of the berm/plywood that is holding the six tanks, making sure to leave enough room for the piping that connects all the pipes to the little building connected to the garage. Really cheating and basing this design on the HO walthers kit Just to be clear, the plywood buildings are just stand-ins for the stuff I'll 3d print later on, with a lot more detail. And I love tank cars, I have 11 of them, some white, some black, for different chemicals. I don't really care what they're supposed to carry, they'll all come and go at this chemical plant/distributor. I wonder if I have some space out back for one of those spherical tanks too. Would just look cool!
Okay, I couldn't resist! That's my collection of tank cars! I think the first one I ever bought was the whale tank car, but after that I mostly bought smaller ones. The latest I bought were the two Broadway Limited Air Liquide cars. I bought them because I was in Toronto watching my daughter compete in Synchronized Swimming and happened to take a break to visit a hobby shop (one that is right next door to Rapido Trains). They were expensive, but I liked them. Super nicely detailed bu the couplers won't couple to anything else without force, and the stupid wheels keep falling out (that's why I don't have them at the end of the train). I need to change the trucks on those things. Still, Air Liquide is something you see around here which is what attracted me to them.
Okay! I'll see what I can do, but not tonight, dinner and family time is coming up, and I need to gather the pictures from my folder.
Looks really good. I’m working on a similar sized layout myself… or I will be soon. Mine is 10 x 3 with a 2 x 4 for middle section. Basically a dog bone. I like your track plan and how it has a hidden reverse loop. One question for ya tho… what is your station kit? It looks like one I had from Walthers in HO but I haven’t ever found a similar one in N.
I must have hid them well, I have two reverse loops Turns out that passenger station is a Heljan kit, Lille banegard. Was a gift from a friend that mistakenly bought it in 2002, he didn't realize it was N scale (he models in HO). I have the full build thread in my first thread, here https://www.trainboard.com/highball...t-to-a-new-layout.117333/page-18#post-1179052
I'm not really a mine person but yours looks so good. Did you add to it custom stuff? And the colors or awesome You have the box to take a picture of? Are the drums custom? So many questions as you can see.
In2tech - I'll write up a full explanation of the mine tomorrow, it's a lot of planning and 3d printed stuff
Ok! so about that mine! This is basically what I started with, the Walther's Diamond Coal mine, this is just some random picture I grabbed off the google: It's got a main building, slack bin, and some corridors/conveyers. It's a nice kit. But what I was really after is this... I dunno if I have no imagination, but I have trouble with coming up with stuff on my own, so I tend to just borrow from everywhere from inspiration, as you can see, this is where my colour scheme came from - I liked the blue walls and silver rusted roofs. I don't think this is even a Zinc mine, but it shares lots of similarities with the ones I've seen - Concentrator tanks, a hoist tower in the back, and other various buildings. Of course, if I modeled this, it would likely take up my entire layout. So I just comically compressed it to something that was mine like for my layout. How do I not hear you asking? Well, I took my cell phone, laid it flat against the ceiling and took this picture: There, a perfectly perpendicular picture of the mine trackage, and a reference ruler, then on to Fusion 360 for a mock-up! I just wanted everything to fit, so I first measured the Walther's mine, and then started making up the rest of the mine as I went along. At this point I already had the majority of the Walther's mine built up (walls, base, roofs, etc), though holding together with masking tape. The tower, office and tanks are all actually built up in separate files (with the tanks here imported into this design). For example, this is the tower's other file, the one I printed: I designed it with the Walther's kit in mind, I used the same type of corrugation, storey heights, windows, etc. However I did make some changes to the Walther's mine itself, namely the garage doors and the pulley doors. The walther's mine had old style barn-like wooden doors, and I replaced them with modern rollup garage doors.
So I don't have a whole lot of intermediate images, and a lot of repeats, so lets see what I get show (I also took these months ago now!) So the Tower itself is actually made up of three buildings, that way I don't have to worry about dreaded warping. Up here you can see that it's dusty from sanding the nubs off from the supports. The buildings were printed vertically, took a decent amount of time, I think this is easily the tallest print I've ever done; follows is a picture of the finished building with primer, look at that beautiful corrugation Then came all of the various little bits and pieces for the tanks. The three tanks are printed as one piece, and then all the ladders, rails and sheds are printed separately. The styrene pieces for the base I used my laser cutter to well, cut. The laser isn't the best tool for this, it not so much cuts as really just melts the plastic, but it's a lot easier than trying to do it by hand, and more accurate too. OH, I broke the timeline, heh, I guess I didn't post any pictures of the mine itself, but it's just a kit. I mean nothing special here, just detach the pieces and glue together as per instructions, but here's a picture anyway: And then we get to a mock-up of the 3D printed parts with the original mine kit. On the slack bin, I left the sone bit off the bottom and decided that this is just an intermediate pump building between the tanks and the main building. The pipes run underground. And yes, why does the track run right between the tanks? It's a disaster waiting to happen! It just does, and the owners bribed the inspectors to look the other way! And a trip to the airbrush booth! More to come...
So I actually had fun and filled the tanks with liquid. What I did is I laser cut a perfect disc of 3mm MDF and then painted that with a mixture of brown and Zinc Chromide hehe, that HAS to be prototypical right?! I then poured in a bit of clear 3d printing resin and hit it with UV light to harden. It works for me, barely even visible under the sheds anyway. And a few pictures of the assembly... I just put some random pipes between all the sheds and the Walther's converted slack bin tower. It was easier than I thought to put everything together, and I especially like how the railing and platforms turned out. I then assembled everything together and weathered the crap out of everything. Unfortunately I don't have much in the way of pictures for that. Also, as seen in the picture below, I needed to make a cover for the conveyor hole in the side of the main building. I just 3d printed a vent and called it a day. Oh, and the little main office is just a simple 3d print, nothing much to see here: And now, for some final pictures on the layout! First, I did add lighting to all the buildings. SInce I didn't do anything to the interiors, I ended up just frosting the windows by sanding the interior glass. Warning, low quality pictures, my cell phone sucks in low light! Later one I will add some light poles outside that will illuminate even more, especially near the tanks, which I didn't illuminate at all.
This is just amazing, thank you so much. I could never tackle this, but glad you did. And the tracks run between the barrels because it's YOUR layout, and looks great. What's a few bucks under the table for an inspector anyway BTW, being brand new to an airbrush with a compressor, what kind of spray booth, and even it is clean, I like your style! Even though my work bench is just a folding table, it drives me crazy when it get's messy, although they have too to get our project(s) done. If it really drives me crazy I take it down and put everything away, after building a plastic model, airbrushing it, working on N-Scale, etc... till next project. I can only stand a mess for so long
And one last picture, I wasn't allowed to include it in the last post... I still have more to do, but that will be for much much later. You know, when I start detailing everything on the layout (bins, more doodads on the walls, roof, etc. Maybe a sign, outdoor lights). I also didn't actually put anything that can lift the covers off the gondolas, LOL. I had big plans for that, but fell through. Maybe no one notices So that's it, hope you enjoyed!
Excellent work on the mine! I love the toxic sludge you added to the tanks, that's great! Where do the covered gons come from?
