I eventually wanted to build a layout with a full engine service facility. A coaling tower was an essential part of that but since my railroad is going to be a narrow gauge short line size was important. There are some O scale kits out there but they are either too big for what I'm doing or too expensive. The Durango tower from Raggs to Riches is really nice but the price of the kit is out of my league. I don't think it's even available anymore. I did some hunting around on the net and found a coaling tower that was used by the DSS&A RR up in Marquette, Michigan. It was rated at about 25 tons which is plenty big enough for my short line. Best of all, Wayne Wesolowski wrote an extensive four part article starting in the May 1988 issue of Model Railroad Craftsman about modeling this coaling tower. My wife got me all four issues for my birthday and even contacted Wayne about the tower. I had everything I needed to get started. I read through the articles and decided I needed a full size drawing. Just as I got started on that I found some photos of a coaling tower at the Henry Ford Museum that looked very similar. This one was recently built in 2014 and designed by an architect using Wayne's article for inspiration. What he designed uses the same basic design but is much beefier looking. I contacted the architect and asked if he would share his drawings. Not the design drawings but he said I could use the line drawings showing all four sides and I could get dimensions from there.
I compared the line drawings of the Ford tower to the drawings of the DSS&A tower and was able to work out dimensions. I made a full set of drawings of my own, mostly based on the Ford design but modified for narrow gauge.
Actual construction was tedious but fairly straightforward. I started with the front and rear frames, added the side framing to tie them together and then boxed in the coal bin board by board. That was the tedious part. For the steel cage around the ladder I used scale sizes of styrene. I also used styrene for the fully operational coal chute. The coal bucket in the back of the tower started out as a kit from Grandt Line for the Durango tower. I cut it down to the proper size, eliminated the wheels and made a hoisting frame based on the DSS&A tower. The coal pit behind the tower is based on the ones used in Durango and Chama with a raised service track. The grating for the pit is another Grandt Line product.
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The styrene parts were painted with a rattle can and then weathered with Bragdon powders (click here). The coal chute and bucket were animated with stepper motors mounted beneath the layout and controlled by an Arduino. The Arduino provides three separate sound tracks for the coaling tower.
The coal chute track starts with the sound of the chute being lowered and the gate opening. The sound of coal falling down the chute lasts for 45 seconds, then the gate closes and the chute is raised.
The coal bucket track starts with the sound of a hit and miss engine starting up in the shack beside the tower. The coal pit gate is opened and coal falls into the bucket for 10 seconds. The gate closes and the bucket raises to the top of the tower, dumps and then lowers back to the pit. This animation repeats 4 more times.
The third sound track has no animation. It was made to provide the sound of a hopper dumping coal into the coal pit behind the tower.
Making sound tracks is another form of scratch building that takes the model to a whole new level of realism. More about creating sound tracks can be found at the "Layout Sound" group on Yahoo (click here).
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