October 2023
Moving the Dust Mill
17/10/23 07:42 Filed in: Plan/Design
Reconfiguring operational elements
A primary ingredient in the mineral composition of soapstone in central Virginia is talc. Talc has a wide range of industrial applications and is a common component in the production processes of paint, paper, ceramics, and many other items. A dust mill is the facililty where a soapstone operation would crush and then mill the stone to a fine powder. The powder would be bagged and shipped to manufacturing plants.
Dust Mill ruins at Schuyler
The vast majority of soapstone quarries yield stone of a quality such that every bit of it is milled into talc. Central Virginia is one of very few places where the integrity of the soapstone cut from the quarries is high enough for it to be formed into dimensional stone for architectural applications. Even so, much of the stone from these same quarries is flawed in some way that prevents it being suitable for sawing and polishing to make finished pieces. A good deal of the high quality stone that makes it into the assembly plant will end up as breakage or cut-off scrap. So the quarries and the assembly plant are both generating raw material for the dust mill, adding operational interest for the train crews.
Mocking up a dust mill site
I am going to have a dust mill on my layout. I had to find a suitable location for it and suspected it could fit along the east wall so I grabbed a pile of structure pieces and parts to try to get an impression of what that would look like.
Layout track plan including dust mill
The current plan for the dust mill and assembly plant:
A: The track that extends into the office to serve the unmodeled Quarry No. 2
B: Gangsaw building
C: Assembly plant
D: Boilerhouse
E: Dust mill
F: Supply sheds and loading area
G: Talc bagging plant
Planning Small Layouts
03/10/23 08:17 Filed in: Plan/Design
I referred to an Iain Rice book in a recent 'Projects' post
Finescale in Small Spaces is a book I pull out often, but it doesn't directly address my particular situation. It is written specifically as a guide for British layout design, therefore the specifics do not apply. But generally it presents ideas I can relate to, so I have tried to extract those ideas and reword them in my planning notes in order to make them more applicable to my layout.
For example:
Rice is confident in the potential of small layouts to be worthwhile, interesting projects. They fit better into overall personal time and resource management. Significant progress can be made at a deliberate pace. Rice considers small layouts to be stage sets, the theater being a good resource for solutions to many situations on a layout that require suspension of disbelief:
- Lose edges and create the illusion of wide open space
- Natural and disguised entrances to storage tracks and staging
- Setting that complements the Theme without obscuring or detracting
- Uniformity that pulls the entire project together with tone, color, and texture
- Sight lines and separate scenes creating a series of events as trains progress around the layout
These factors are far easier to address on small, simple layouts. In many ways it is more achievable for a small layout to be a good layout. My personal definition of a "good" layout is one that is a composed, functional display of the builder's interests, apptitudes, and abilities.