flatcar with finished marble load

[Bill Gill]

Awhile back I modified two 40ft flatcars to carry blocks of raw marble from quarries to a processing site for the New England Berkshire & Western RR. Now here is a flatcar hauling crates of finished marble from the site. Because this is another "operations" car the details and finish are more robust than a display model. The flatcar is a 36 ft Rutland resin kit from Funaro & Camerlengo pretty much built as intended. But the boxtop photo of that kit showed thin pieces of finished marble loosely stacked on the deck, something I doubted would be the way marble would have been shipped any distance.

Photos from the club's collection showed marble in crates at Proctor, Vermont and although most of it probably got shipped inside boxcars, a couple photos showed flatcars with low sides loaded with marble in crates. Since visible loads are more interesting for train crews during operating sessions, I decided to model a flatcar load of finished marble.

Here are two photos from the club showing marble in crates and on flatcars (The flat car in the photo with the crane is just visible in the lower right) and two photos of the model.

[lab-dad]

Turned out good!
What did you use for the marble?
Marty

[Lawton Maner]

Nicely done.  I am continuously impressed by the work of the NEB&W Club members in general.  Never apologize for layout level modeling when it is of your club's quality.

Note the blocking in the second photo which presses the larger slabs tightly against the sides of the car.  Loads like finished marble need to be tightly packed in order to keep the load from becoming a battering ram during shipment.

[Bill Gill]

Thanks, Marty. Originally I planned to cut thin scraps of real Vermont marble that I got from a stone shop, but the club thought the texture was too coarse for HO scale. I wound up using scraps of Azek, a dense PVC foam used for exterior house trim. That wound up with a few advantages: I could chop the small sizes needed using a single edged razor blade and get a face that looked like it could be sawn marble. Also the Azek scribed easily to represent several separate pieces in each crate. And the strip styrene used for the crates could be bonded to the Azek with solvent.

One disadvantage here was that the Azek is very light weight. I salvaged a steel weight from a junk car and attached it to the top of the flatcar deck. The crates are shorter in height to accommodate the weight and gray wood sides hide it.

Thanks, Lawton. One of the most time consuming parts of this project was packing all the crates tightly together. I started out estimating some standard sizes for the marble and crates using the photo with the overhead crane for reference. Then cut a bunch of Azek blocks and glued the pre-painted styrene to them. Despite the preplanning, the crates did not exactly fit as multiples of the load space, so additional "fudged" crates were made to fill the rest.

That second photo showed up after I finished the load. It would have been very helpful because as I played "Tetris" with the crates I wondered how the inevitable gaps in real loads were filled or secured to keep the load from crushing through the sides.

[TRAINS1941]

Bill a very nice job.

Jerry

[Bill Gill]

Thank you, Jerry.

[finescalerr]

Thanks for posting, Bill. For the past few days it's been dead around here. Maybe your creativity and skill will inspire some of us (like me) to get back to the bench. -- Russ

[Ray Dunakin]

Great work, and an interesting prototype.

[Chuck Doan]

Yes, a very nice model and an unusual prototype!

[Bill Gill]

Thanks, Russ, Ray and Chuck.

[Bill Gill]

Most of the raw marble probably didn't go very far for processing, but the finished stuff got shipped  all over. Here's one example from Vermont Marble Also all the white marble for the Arlington Memorial at the Arlington National Cemetery was shipped from Vermont. it's the largest cemetery memorial in the world and took about 450 carloads. Vermont marble was used elsewhere in Washington, D.C. and around the country, so, while not common, marble loads might be seen moving along almost anywhere.

[Bill Gill]

Here's the AAR diagram I used as a rough guide for the NEB&W load.

[Bill Gill]

And there was a lot of breakage and waste from quarry to final installation. Here's a 1953 photo of part of the causeway across the south end of Lake Champlain. Lots of waste marble for riprap!