Hemlock Street Part 5 - The Mine | 0 Comments - Click Here :

Denver Public Library

   
    Keith Hayes - Remember I had gotten Four-Fingered Tony’s from Bar-Mills and used all the grocery parts for Carleno’s Grocery? Well, the model parts sat on my bench for a while and I got to thinking it had the makings of a mine. Back behind Hemlock Street I have a couple drain pipes that need hiding. Leadville slopes up to the mines east of town, and the Penrose mine can be seen south of the Leadville Depot in the title photograph (the Penrose will be the subject of a future model.). I thought of adding an HO mine on a hillside of tailings to contribute to the forced-perspective scene.

    Due to the elevation, low temperatures and snow, Leadville mines feature head frames that are fully sheathed, usually with a lower gable below and a higher roof surrounding the head frame. Tony’s has two pieces, a low shed and a slightly larger gabled building. I figured by adding a short tower to Tony’s, I would have the form. The kit is an ‘L’ shape in plan, and I would have liked the inside corner to face the front of the layout, but it was not to be.  Likewise I would like to have kept the wood siding, but by the 30s, all the working mines were covered in corrugated metal.

    For this project, I ordered corrugated metal from Wild West. This is a nice product with a silver finish; I followed the tips and sprayed the strips of material with several colors of brown and rust. (Be sure to paint more than you need and account for laps—I did not and had to paint a second batch.) Next I cut the strips into eight foot lengths, and glued this to the wood substrate, work from the bottom up, and one side to the other.

    Once again, a Grandt kit solved a problem for me. The Wentamuck Mine has a slew of great parts, including a couple structures, log cribbing, mine track and ore cars. There is also a small head frame I may use elsewhere on the layout in the future. I called Grandt and also ordered some extra cribbing and track, which yielded a second ore car. I cut some foam to form the tailing piles, and pieced together the cribbing to hold it in place. What is great about this cribbing is that the castings have realistic dead-men (the logs that extend back into the hill to hold the wall into place). The foam was painted with tan latex paint, into which I sprinkled sand. Last I covered the surface in sifted tailings. Studying photos of cribbing, note that water leaches the minerals out of the rock and across the timbers, so be sure to add some stains of yellow and red to cribbing.

    I used the track to layout some trestles to distribute the tailings. These were built up from styrene stock, and I glued the track to the top. The assembly got painted with the tan camo paint and then detailed with washes of craft paint.

This is the basic Bar Mills kit mocked up on my work bench. The building has a nice form and could also make a neat grain elevator. The notch fit nicely around the drain pipe, so I had to accept that this side would face the backdrop. Industrial buildings are simple, as they want to spend them money on the equipment inside, not fancy architecture.

The mine has been assembled, and I added a styrene box on top to conceal the head works of the elevator. The wood frame to the right will become the exterior portion of the head frame. I primed the wood with a Rustoleum gray to seal it, and followed with a coat of my favorite camouflage tan. The spots of white were brushed on in anticipation that I would install the corrugated metal with some rough edges and let the inner siding peek through. I did not do this in the end. I glued the metal siding on with white glue (it is really a paper product).

Here is the mine in place. I built the trestles from styrene. The tipple is an Anvil Mountain Models kit. There are images in The Mineral Belt of the Coronado Mine, which Brother d reports had a contract with the C&S to dispose of mine tailings as fill and rip rap (the Coronado was literally in the city and had limited space for tailings.) The mine car, track and small buildings are parts from the Grandt Wentamuck Mine. The lettering is dry transfer, and I added some streaks with white water color pencil. The building will be a great distraction to the sewer pipe, wont it?

This is the scene today. I used the other part of the Bar Mills kit as a warehouse/ loading dock. The cribbing is from the Grandt Wentamuck mine and has been colored with yellows, tans and white to simulate staining from the tailings pile. The miners need a way to get from the track level to the mine, so stair will be placed in front of the tipple. Some HO figures up on the trestles will complete the scene. 

Keith Hayes

Leadville in Sn3