HO coal silo

[Bill Gill]

Russ commented on another thread that he liked the HO scale coal silo in the April issue of Railroad Model Craftsman that I had an article about.
Rather than hijack Ray Dunakin's thread on his terrific In-ko-pah RR. Here are a few photos of the coal silo.
The silo itself is a salvaged styrene mailing tube that turned out to be exactly the right diameter. The elevator shaft and head house are taken
from an old Plasticville rectangular coaling station and slightly modified. It turned out to be exactly the right height. Photos to follow in next posts.

[Bill Gill]

The first photo shows the silo on my HO scale Connecticut & Vermont RR
The second is my sketch of a pair of ramshackle silos in Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts (long gone) that inspired the model.

Clicking on the photos will enlarge them.

[Bill Gill]

The first photo shows an angle not visible on the layout.
The next photos is the coal chute for the delivery trucks made of bits of styrene, wire and a mesh teabag.
The last photo shows Barney's Lego influence is so strong it affected my modeling even before I met him on this forum
(The tall yellow Lego track on the left was slightly modified to represent the bucket elevator dimly seen in the shaft tower,
and the small Lego blocks on the right provided the core for the small truck scale housing seen on far right.)

[Ray Dunakin]

Excellent!

[TRAINS1941]

Very nice Bill.

Jerry

[Bill Gill]

Thank you, Ray and Jerry.

[Lawton Maner]

     I love the use of the high end tea bag in the delivery chute.  I have used recycled tea bags to represent window screen over the years.  With the ones I have used, once they have given up their tea, the color of them takes on a rusty tone like that of older screens.  Particularly good texture for O Scale models.
     The used tea leaves can be dried and used as leaf litter under trees when doing scenery.  Being from a long line of people who have the habit of squeezing the manure out of the Buffalo Nickel before spending it, finding a use for an entire used tea bag thrills me and drives my wife up a ten story tall wall.

[Bill Gill]

Thank you, Lawton.
If you look at the sepia photo, there is a screen door on the small office. That screen is from an even finer mesh tea bag.
I have discovered there are a number of mesh sizes, sometimes even the same tea company seems to change the material they use for their bags.
Lots of uses. And even paper tea bags are useful. The paper is tough and can be used for heavy canvas.

[Lawton Maner]

Great idea for canvas.  And the color of the used bag doesn't need further work to make it look like older material.

[finescalerr]

The only tea company I know of with nylon(?) mesh teabags suitable for models is Lipton. I used one about a year and a half ago for an HO structure (to see if I could still build in that small scale) but it was really more suitable for 1:48 and larger. -- Russ

[Bill Gill]

My wife was a teacher and got gift baskets from families that often had different brands of tea.
That's wher I first started noticing some of them were in a very different looking tea bag.
Many were glued together with some kind of food safe adhesive that readily pulls apart, leaving
a neat rectangle of ?Nylon?
But hard to tell from the box or tin which brands have mesh bags in side.

[finescalerr]

My wife gets all kinds of tea from various countries. So far all but Lipton use paper. I drink tea instead of coffee so it would be no problem to buy some just for "plastic" tea bags with the right size mesh. Isn't this an odd discussion? -- Russ

[Lawton Maner]

Russ:
     Anything which spreads the skills of this group isn't strange, its educational!  I hadn't thought about using paper tea bag material to represent canvas.  Since I work in 1:48, I will probably be able to use it as awnings and other small items.  I'll have to think out of the bag once it is iced tea season.
     Many of the higher grades of foreign source teas come in fine mesh bags.  One of my wife's favorite ones is German with a bit of cracked cinnamon in it.  What I want to find is a mesh bag of the larger size such as the ones for bulk iced tea.

[Hydrostat]

Lawton,

check out something like that: https://www.aliexpress.com/i/32924534442.html

Cheers,
volker

[Bill Gill]

Lawton,

I have seen paper teabags used for canvas awnings and I think it was O scale. They even had a striped pattern printed on them by taping the teabag to a plain sheet of paper and feeding through a printer.

Russ,
Tea Guys is one brand that uses Nylon bags. I don't think it is widely ditributed nationally. I've seen them use two different size meshes.   
There is also very fine polyester screen used for some silk screen printing and Some T-shirt shops have given away tiny scraps.