Thansgiving accomplishments

The long weekend was not lost on my copper smelter module, as I continued work on the coal dock and started construction of both the warehouse and mineral house.

Coal is delivered by scow, hoisted to the upper deck, where it is loaded into carts and dumped into the coal bins beneath the two large openings. From here, it was shoveled manually into 18" gauge carts and pushed to fire the smelter, boiler and the cupola furnace. Still to come - stairs to the upper level, carts, railings around the upper deck and a pair of derricks.

 The privy on the lower level dumped directly down a pipe into the river. Unsanitary and environmentally inappropriate in today's world, but expediency was the name of the game in the early 1900's.

 A view with the upper deck removed showing the coal after being dumped into the storage bins.

The mineral house where ore was stored after being delivered by rail from the stamp mill. The ore was dumped from drop bottom gondolas into a pit beneath the rail and then transferred up into the storage bins by a bucket conveyor. From there, it was loaded via via the chutes into the 18" narrow gauge cars which were manually pushed to the furnace building. Still to come - the roof, ladder, platform and the loading conveyor.

The mineral house in the foreground with the original card mockup in the background. The 18" gauge manually powered rail system snaked throughout the complex, both on the ground and on spindly trestles between some of the buildings.I placed an unweathered car and a piece of track in front of the structure to provide a sense of scale.

The storage barn in which cast copper ingots and plates were stored prior to being loaded onto vessels for shipment to the industrial centers throughout the Great Lakes.