Some of the discussions here have prompted me to wonder about some of my planned industries… Kevin said before that if a mine produces 14 carloads a day, and your trains have seven cars each, that you need to make two trips a day to the mine …
So, I’m wondering…
How much stuff will my industries consume, realistically? I know this depends largely on the size of the operations involved … but bear with me.
The Slate Creek will serve a power plant, and a mine or two, as well as some local goods interests, and some feed/supplies for a large farm. I’m wondering in the 1:1 world just how much such things would either produce or consume…
The power plant is one of these one boiler at a time/ two of three turbine at a time power plants… my idea was to make it loosely similar to the power plant you see in Old Saybrook CT that used to power the trolley system… one big stack, and a relatively small building, say two stories tall and 160 feet long or so… another similar idea is the popular Walthers kit… http://www.nscalesupply.com/Wal/WAL-933-3214.html … just to illustrate the kind of plant I mean. How much coal does a place like this use? The trackside coal dump seems to dump hoppers into the basement… so you couldn’t dump a whole trainload down there and still have room for the stoker, right? Does that mean if the plant uses two carloads a day, that someone has to shift the cars around to dump them twice a day, as there’s only room for one down there?
Similarly, there’s the mine siding… and I’m wondering, with a mine tram of three or four cars running back and forth, how much ore your standard silver/gold/copper/mystery metal mine of this size might produce in a day… if we leave a gon or two on the siding, will that be sufficient for a day’s diggings, or are we going to have to switch it out four times a day? I’m thinking here of a mine along the lines of the one you see from the Georgetown Loop, or the ones in Silverton… only with some kind of electric trammer to pull the ore out like you see pulling the tours at Georgetown now instead of the mule or hand powered carts, for which the motive power is a little harder to model operationally!
I’m figuring on trains between 5 and 10 cars in length… at least for operations purposes. Passenger consists will be nominally 3 cars due to the large size of the cars in 1:20.3. Of course that means building the ONE car I already have… (I’m catching up as fast as I can guys!) Passenger service will carry tourists (many) residents (comparatively few) and mine workers (lots) back and forth between island stops, the pier, and the mine, and provide regularly scheduled obstacles to work around…
There’s even talk of an older mine shaft being used as a supply dump for the military… with supply and ammo trains to the pier… and a proposed rail artillery unit to keep the supplies away from the hottentots. Handle those live rounds GENTLY …
So how much wood does a woodchuck chuck… or how much coal does a power plant use?