The Southport Coaling Tower

The PRR Pro Modelers Yahoo Group has selected Pennsy Coaling Facilities as their next project.  After seeing the announcement, I thought that a coaling tower is a must have for the layout.  I thought that it would make an interesting next project for my S scale version of the Elmira Branch.  I know that I should probably be spending my time more productively by finishing the layout room, but I thought that building the coaling tower would provide a nice break from sanding drywall.

One of the most prominent features of the Southport Engine Facility is the massive concrete coaling tower used the fill the tenders of all those I-1's.  No one makes anything reasonably close to it in S scale, so scratch building is the only option for me.  That was the first hurdle to overcome.  The second was that I couldn't find plans for it anywhere.  As luck would have it, the Spring 2012 issue of The Keystone Modeler featured a scratch built version of the Northumberland coaling tower by Chuck Cover.  Northumberland was a smaller version of the Southport tower with six legs instead of eight, but it gave me a clue as to how to determine the dimensions of the Southport tower.  Southport is a cousin to the tower at Renovo, PA and the Renovo tower still exists.  Renovo is at best an 8-10 hour drive from where I live, so I knew that measuring it was out of the question.  Even if went to Renovo, there was no way that I could ever accurately measure such a massive structure.

Fortunately, photos of the Renovo tower exist all over the internet.  Just type Renovo Coaling Tower into Google and dozens of images will appear.  So using known dimensions in the photographs, such as the height of a handrail, track gauge, or the height of an average person, you could approximate the dimension of the structure.  With that I created a reasonable set of drawings of all four sides of the structure.  I'm sure that the dimensions are not exact but they look close enough to represent the Southport tower.  In S scale it's impressive measuring well over 15" tall.

The next obstacle to tackle was what material to use to represent the concrete structure.  At first I thought of casting it from plaster, but that would have been a nightmare to try make castings and then try and fit them all together.  In Chuck's article, he constructed the tower using styrene that he scribed to represent the individual boards that made up the formwork of the original structure.  The results were quite striking and when painted it resembled a concrete structure.  So I thought about using styrene, but forms lines would actually be the reverse of scribed material and I felt that in S scale the difference would be noticeable.  So I tried to think of another way of representing this huge multi-surface concrete structure.

Because I'm a part-time artist and I mat and frame much of my own art work, I have literally hundreds of sheets of scrap mat board in various sizes.  Mat board is roughly 1/16th of an inch thick and formed by compressing multiple layers of paper.  It is quire sturdy and could be joined using ordinary white glue.  It's texture is smooth and could easily represent concrete, but I still had two problems to solve - (1) how to I join the sections together without showing the edge of the mat board, and (2) how do I represent the wooden form lines?

The first problem was a relatively simple solution.  I used my mat cutter to cut the edges of the mat board to a 45-degree angle.  This gave the edges a nice clean seamless look.  I was pleased.  The second issue presented quite a challenge.  I experimented a bit and finally cam up with a reasonably good solution.  Instead of scribing the lines, why not do the reverse and scribe the boards?  So using a large triangle and a 1/8" wide flat bladed screwdriver I dragged the tip through the mat board with slight even downward pressure. Then I repeated the process by lining up the blade next to the newly scribed board.  If you leave a slight gap it almost appears that the boards are depressed and the gap is raised, just the effect that you're trying to achieve.  Occasionally you can skip a board to give some unevenness to the the forms.  Here's close up of the corner showing the board pattern:

I think it's pretty convincing.  We'll have to see how it looks after it's painted, but for now I'm happy with it.  Many more problems to deal with, but the basic structure problems are solved.  I reinforced the corners with 1/4" and 3/8' square basswood.  The resulting structure is quite strong and very lightweight.  I wish that I had it easy like the HO guys when it come to coal chutes and the hoist mechanism.  I guess that I'll be doing quite a bit of scratch building in that area.

You can access Chuck Cover's article by downloading the Keystone Modeler at the Pennsylvania Railroad Technical and Historical Society's website at: www.prrt&hs.com and clicking on the Keystone Modeler link.  It's a free quarterly magazine providing outstanding information for the PRR modeler.

I'm also happy to report that progress continues on the layout room as well.  This week painting of the walls has begun and now hopefully before the end of the summer layout construction and commence.