Scrap heap

[Ray Von]

This includes buildings:  I imagined my scrapyard to be on sidings no longer used by the railway, at one end the goods shed was developed and a "modern" extension was added and at the other end an engine shed is used as a large workshop for stripping vehicles of parts before adding to the heap (the track leading to the engine shed had long since been torn up or buried under old cars!)

 

Just imagine how you would run a scrapyard if you were in charge and have fun with it! 

[Fat Controller]

Corgi did an older version of a Coles crane, typical of those used in many scrapyards- there was one in a former scrap yard at Kearnsey (Dover) until quite recently. Another type often seen was the 'Iron Fairy'; Matchbox used to do one.

Another essential bit of plant is a Manitou, or similar, off-road forklift; those stacks of car don't appear by levitation, and the bales from the presses have to be moved somehow.

Some scrapyards develop niche markets; ship-breakers and railway stock breakers are the obvious, but others deal in old buses, HGVs or plant. If you travel on HS1 towards London from Kent, there are several such yards around Purfleet. Others used to deal in ex MoD vehicles; in the 1980s, there was one outside Hexham that still had some WW2 lorries, albeit in a very sad condition.

That side chute on the shredder is probably for windscreen glass and similar material- it would probably have a skip under it.. Note that such machines are fairly recent, coinciding with the increasing use of electric-arc furnaces. Previously, bales were preferred.

Edited April 22, 2019 by Fat Controller
Added content

[Porkscratching]

Definitely a manitou type thing.. they're brilliant!

When i was working on ctrl contract , I'd just hijack the nearest one and get them to drop my welding genny trailer in the 4ft adjacent to whatever wagon I was attending to..very handy

[47137]

Manitou had a display at an agricultural show near me, machines for stacking bales of hay and with access platforms. The salesman explained he could never go in them, he had a terrible head for heights :-)

 

I think the crane can be something compact, manoeuvrerable in a small space.

 

This is the space for my scrapyard, aka the 'vehicle dismantlers' on my layout. I set this up some years ago for a chemical plant. The chemical plant has tall narrow structures and it ended up somewhere else on the layout. The scrapyard is a lower more sprawling thing and I expect I will move the sidings. The NG will go, this was too much railway in the space available.

 

The backscene photos faded hopelessly but I can print them again. The model will show the near end of the yard not the whole yard, so some details can be off scene. So I might have a fork-lift but not a crane. My challenge at the moment is placing the shredder.

 

- Richard.

[47137]

1 hour ago, Fat Controller said:

That side chute on the shredder is probably for windscreen glass and similar material- it would probably have a skip under it.. Note that such machines are fairly recent, coinciding with the increasing use of electric-arc furnaces. Previously, bales were preferred.

 

Yes the machine is more 'metals processor' than mere shredder, a modern thing. I like the idea of a skip here. Perhaps it would be for plastics as well as glass.

 

- Richard.

[Ray Von]

Here is an article that talks about metals as freight on the railways (scrap gets a mention about 2/3's down):

 

http://www.igg.org.uk/rail/7-fops/fo-metals.htm

Edited April 22, 2019 by Ray Von

[47137]

4 hours ago, Ray Von said:

Here is an article that talks about metals as freight on the railways (scrap gets a mention about 2/3's down):

 

http://www.igg.org.uk/rail/7-fops/fo-metals.htm

 

The article has good pointers to possible wagons. I would want something air-braked, perhaps one of these:

https://paulbartlett.zenfolio.com/img/s/v-3/p477752365-3.jpg

 

POA scrap carrier, diagram PO21B.

I believe, the 'PO' here means a privately-owned, open wagon, and so somewhere in diagram book 300.

 

- Richard.

[47137]

On 17/04/2019 at 08:56, 47137 said:

 

The Kibri cabin is still around. Nowadays it comes on a low loader with a Mercedes lorry and a hiab crane, so perfect for my layout. I can use the lorry to bring something else into the scrapyard. (I had the Knightwing cabin on a layout now sold and it is very much 00, too big for H0).

 

My Kibri Portacabin arrived today. Bit of a shock to see it and its lorry are a kit - well over a hundred parts! Somehow I was expecting, well, a Portacabin and a lorry. Probably a good thing in the long run; I can build the lorry as right-hand drive.

 

It would be sensible to build the Portacabin now, to use it to plan the scrapyard, and leave the lorry for a rainy day. But it all looks quite an interesting kit :-)

 

- Richard.

['CHARD]

On 10/04/2019 at 20:20, The Johnster said:

 

A 'Liberty' type freighter, the 'S.S. Samtampa' was lost (sadly with all hands and those aboard the Mumbles Lifeboat as well) on Sker rocks, to the west of Porthcawl, in 1947, and was bought and dismantled in situ by a husband and wife team who lived in a caravan on site for the duration of the job.  They used a war surplus Sherman tank with the turret missing to winch and chain drag material over the rocks and about 4 miles along the beach including fording the River Kenfig to be delivered to Port Talbot steelworks; took 'em a few years to dismantle and cut the 14,000 ton ship, which had broken into 3 parts during the wreck, and drag it piece by piece to be melted down.  The ship's boiler was still visible on the rocks 15 years later and parts of the engine  frame can be seen sometimes at the lowest spring tides; some of the material was beyond even this intrepid pair.  The scrapper couple are still remembered in the Porthcawl area; I challenge anyone to model this and be believed!

 

It was quite common for wrecked ships to be broken up at the wreck site, especially if they were too badly damaged to be patched, refloated, and towed to a shipbreakers.

 

This anecdote was so fascinating, that I had to research it.  YouTube had this wonderful bit of reportage, Pathe style!

 

 

[47137]

The shredder is now built: 

 

For my own scrapyard, I think the way ahead is to build the Kibri Portacabin and then one more structure, perhaps part of a building able to take a train. This might be a Pikestuff model. If I add an access road and some piles of scrap, the model will probably build itself. I bought half a dozen Lima class 33 bodies a while ago (I think they were 50p each!) to stack them up but I'm not sure if there will be enough room.

 

- Richard.

[Porkscratching]

Looks good, just needs lots of Filth and Rust !

[Philou]

@47137

 

My reply was to say that it was a non-ferrous material belt but the page refreshed well after The Fat Controller had already replied - don't know what happened there - so deleted.

 

Cheers,

 

Philip

Edited April 24, 2019 by Philou
Glitch in page refresh.

[steve1]

You need a police car with a woolly suit and dishevelled detective by it and some dodgy geezers being questioned to give the scene a bit of atmosphere. 

 

steve

[Fat Controller]

A feature of many of the smaller scrapyards I remember was a vertical pipe emerging from a heap of scrap; if you approached this, you'd find a (hopefully) chained-up Doberman. The stack would emanate from an improvised smelter, designed to render non-ferrous metals unidentifiable to their previous owners. Aluminium beer kegs were their main target, but things like phosphor-bronze wheel-bearings and old cable would also pass through. I've known of a rake of forty or so mineral wagons that lost their bearings when stabled at St Thomas, Swansea, over 'stop fortnight'.

 

[47137]

10 hours ago, Porkscratching said:

Looks good, just needs lots of Filth and Rust !

 

I think the machine can stay fairly clean. It is loaded by a conveyor not a crane, so there won't be much impact damage and rust on the outside. Just some weathering from the rain. But I can go to town on the scrap. I'm not sure what form this will take. The operation is supposed to be a "vehicle dismantlers". This is one of the purposes of the railway. In my fiction it deals with entire railway vehicles, but this will be happening off-scene. So the scrap going into the machine can be pieces of train or maybe road vehicles too. I need to have a think about how recognisable these need to be.

 

- Richard.

[Fat Controller]

8 minutes ago, 47137 said:

 

I think the machine can stay fairly clean. It is loaded by a conveyor not a crane, so there won't be much impact damage and rust on the outside. Just some weathering from the rain. But I can go to town on the scrap. I'm not sure what form this will take. The operation is supposed to be a "vehicle dismantlers". This is one of the purposes of the railway. In my fiction it deals with entire railway vehicles, but this will be happening off-scene. So the scrap going into the machine can be pieces of train or maybe road vehicles too. I need to have a think about how recognisable these need to be.

 

- Richard.

What happens at a lot of smaller yards is that they first strip vehicles of re-saleable parts. They then stack said vehicles, either flattened or intact, until either the price of scrap merits selling on, or they run out of space. Then, either one of the big firms will either send round a portable shredder, built around a semi-trailer, or the scrap bodies will be taken to their premises in bulk tippers (though I have seen flattened cars loaded on flat beds)

[47137]

22 hours ago, Fat Controller said:

What happens at a lot of smaller yards is that they first strip vehicles of re-saleable parts. They then stack said vehicles, either flattened or intact, until either the price of scrap merits selling on, or they run out of space. Then, either one of the big firms will either send round a portable shredder, built around a semi-trailer, or the scrap bodies will be taken to their premises in bulk tippers (though I have seen flattened cars loaded on flat beds)

 

I would like to suppose, my scrap yard used to operate much like this but is now hoping to improve turnover and indeed profitability by doing some of the metals reprocessing on site. They have bought a metals shredder/processor, and have set it up at the front of their yard. Here is my mock-up:

 

The long siding is for arrivals. Wagons carrying scrap and indeed intact rail vehicles enter a shed where they are stripped. The carcasses are stacked up, mostly beyond here, off-scene. The model cars represents the front row.

 

The short siding is just about long enough to hold one long 4-wheel wagon - perhaps a VGA, a 1970s ferry wagon, or a PFA with a 20ft container. These wagons are for departures, and will take away reusable parts (perhaps instruments or engines) or shredded metals.

 

Both sidings to be inset into the ground. The shed would be a modern structure, and an inch or so shorter than in my mock-up.

 

The transit van here might be the Police vehicle suggested earlier.

 

I have a constraint on the design, in that I want the ground surface behind the tracks to be able to lift away, to reach the track underneath. So the lift-out section would be a "jigsaw" shape, holding the shredder and JCB but not the pile of cars.

 

Ideas / suggestions welcome!

 

- Richard.

[47137]

I have had a go with the Wills Modern building to make something with proportions for the location.  This is a bit better but the result isn't really a credit to either me or to the kit:

 

The Pikestuff models look good but the difficulty is, dealers in Britain will only order items shown in stock at Walthers and the likely kits are out of stock. As a challenge I think I should try something myself. Doors and windows from the Wills kit.

 

- Richard.

[Ray Von]

It's starting to take shape!  I'm not sure if the grey building looks right - it seems a bit tall, as do the two doors, do you need that much clearance?  I think the windows look a bit odd too - being so high up on a one storey building, maybe they would look better as air vents or similar, or hidden behind some signage?   

The building itself will look great once it's painted and weathered a bit, but I would definitely think about making it slightly more "squat" if possible.  Just my opinion, hope it's helpful. 

 

[47137]

13 hours ago, Ray Von said:

It's starting to take shape!  I'm not sure if the grey building looks right - it seems a bit tall, as do the two doors, do you need that much clearance?  I think the windows look a bit odd too - being so high up on a one storey building, maybe they would look better as air vents or similar, or hidden behind some signage?   

The building itself will look great once it's painted and weathered a bit, but I would definitely think about making it slightly more "squat" if possible.  Just my opinion, hope it's helpful. 

 

 

The idea is the bottom 5 mm or so of the walls will drop into a rebate in the baseboard. This would let me have a fixed floor with inset track. But really, the model has too many faults and one of these is the style of cladding just seems wrong. The walls are warped too.

 

I've ordered up a Pikestuff "Tri-Star Industries", not ideal but I do find it easier to kit bash buildings than to build from scratch. Also, buying a kit is a cheaper way of obtaining the materials - I looked at Evergreen styrene sheets yesterday, I would need at least three and they are £9 a pop in the local model shop.

 

This model may take a while. I am rather taken by the idea of the Veissmann 5172 "roller door with motor drive", not released yet.

 

- Richard.

[47137]

I've been rebuilding this part of my layout, with a new section of baseboard and new track. So the mock-up now looks like this:

 

 

The Pikestuff kit for "Tri Star Industries" has arrived and it turns out to be more useful than the manufacturer's photo suggests - the steel-clad walls are full-height and I can build the model without dwarf walls underneath them.

 

My sensible order of construction now is to build this 'dismantling shed' from the Pikestuff parts and set up its base on the layout in the process. Then bury the inset tracks. I don't really have a time-scale for this, but the building will be one of only two significant buildings on the layout and I would like to make it nicely detailed.

 

- Richard.

[47137]

On 20/04/2019 at 09:45, Ray Von said:

 

Cheers, it's a Ruston Bucyrus 19RB by Langley(?) Models - white metal and brass kit, VERY fiddly in 'N' gauge!  I'm trying to find an appropriate claw or magnet attachment, but haven't had much luck as yet.

 

There is a clear view of a late 1950's / early 1960s magnet in "Goldfinger", the scene where the hood has "a pressing engagement". You see the magnet from above, like the usual viewing point of a model. The magnet is like a large button, about 3 feet diameter.

 

- Richard.

[47137]

On 30/04/2019 at 18:40, Ray Von said:

It's starting to take shape!  I'm not sure if the grey building looks right - it seems a bit tall, as do the two doors, do you need that much clearance?  I think the windows look a bit odd too - being so high up on a one storey building, maybe they would look better as air vents or similar, or hidden behind some signage?   

The building itself will look great once it's painted and weathered a bit, but I would definitely think about making it slightly more "squat" if possible.  Just my opinion, hope it's helpful. 

 

 

Ray I agree completely. To be honest, I'm not terribly happy with this Wills kit. It is marketed as '00/H0' like a lot of Peco items, but while many of their products are close to or a true H0, this is neither one scale nor the other. The pedestrian doors are 1mm too low for 00 and 1mm too wide for H0. The roller doors scale up to 13 ft wide in 00 (seems generous) and nearly 15 ft in H0. I trimmed down the dwarf brick walls for H0 but this left the model with some very odd proportions although you put this much more politely!

 

I have bought a Pikestuff kit 'Tri Star Industries' from Model Junction and here are two of the walls arranged around my first building:

 

The new model is maybe 5 mm longer, 5 mm wider and 5-10 mm lower but it looks a whole lot better. With the steel cladding going down to a concrete base instead of brick walls going down into the ground, it will be a whole lot easier to site on the baseboard too.

 

I fancy some air conditioning units hung on the side wall here.

 

- Richard.