Monday, March 19, 2012

THE BLOG SITE HAS MOVED!!

A very slight change has occurred in my blog.  It can now be viewed at http://gotts-n-blog.blogspot.com/
Clicky the linky and I'll see you there!!

jgotts

Sunday, March 18, 2012

Ore Dock Development stage 3

Hola!  We're well into 2012 and I've had a few seconds to get back to my hobby.  I'm so very tempted to start up in different areas of the layout, but I disciplined myself and am going to finish the ore dock 1st.  The dock itself is a single sided dock because they could get a large ship into the east side of the dock.  There are several other ore docks to the west of this one to make up for this problem (in reality there is only the one on my layout!)  This dock is unique in that both tracks of ore cars are unloaded into the west side of the dock so a ship can technically be loaded twice as fast.

I put on some stairs, so workers don't have to walk all the way down the tracks to the actual dock and I've also applied a railing around the entire dock deck.  That was pretty tedious because I didn't have enough of any one type of plastic railing to put on. So I created the railing all out of short cuts of wire, in different diameters.  I drilled holes to mount them all and used tacky glue to hold them in the holes and CA to attach the wire handrail.  I gave it all a shot of what I refer to as steel blue (sort of a bluish / green paint) to the entire structure other than the deck, which is black.  Next a misting of a brick / ore red color for depth and then onto the creating all the ore chutes themselves, along with the associated cable's and winches that raise and lower them.  Oh, and the track too!

Close up shot of the stairway leading
up to the unloading deck.
East side with freshly primed Steel
Structure & new hand rail along the
top unloading deck.
This is the stairway pre-paint.

While looking a bit like an aircraft carrier
this is the west side of the ore dock
without any of the unloading chutes on it.