Clay Manufacturing Company

The photo below shows the Kittanning Clay Manufacturing Company vintage about 1900.  The company was located in Kittanning Pennsylvania and manufactured bricks using the clay from the adjacent clay pit partially visible on the hill to the right.  The clay was ground, screened, and mixed in a pug mill.  The bricks were then molded and wire cut in a stiff-mud machine.  They used two rectangular up-draft kilns and four round down-draft kilns.  Gas was furnished in pipe lines to heat the kilns.  The works was close by the Allegheny Valley railroad and was equipped with a siding.

In the photo you can see two round kilns and the finished brick loading shed next to the rail siding.  There is a gondola car next to the shed with a worker on top.

Coal dock crane

My brick ovens are heated with coal so I have built a coal dock to be supplied from the railroad mainline.  The coal is loaded from gondolas into large buckets which are hoisted by the crane onto the platform, and then the bucket is moved to a small flat car on the brickworks narrow gauge.  The car is then moved to the ovens where the coal is shoveled onto the ground, and then into the ovens for baking the bricks.  Very labor intensive work.

The crane is a Tichy kit.  The buckets are cast metal - I believe by Durango press but that may be wrong as they have been in my scrap box for a long time.  The platform is made from strip wood with a liberal dusting of black chalk dust.

Lots of fun doing this stuff.

Brickworks office

The office is the last structure in the brickworks and the only one made of brick.  I used some cut down wall sections from a DPM kit for the basic building.  I added a wood peaked roof as the basic flat roof DPM kit did not have the right look.  I also added a stone foundation to change the look further.  There is a small wood entrance extension on the right rear side.  Since there is no interior, I sprayed a frosted coating on the outside of each window to represent dust and glued tan paper inside to represent blinds.  Almost all of the structures on my railroad have dusty windows.

I added a pigeon to the peak of the roof, and painted it white with shades of gray on the head and tail.  Pure white pigeons are less common and definitely not interesting.

Brick kilns

My brickworks will have 4 kilns with a stack between each pair.  These kilns are of the downdraft style where the fuel (in my case coal) is fired around the sides with the heat forced up to the rounded roof then down over the green (unbaked) bricks in the center.  The hot gases then move downward though grates in the floor and into the adjoining chimney.  The coal and firing is input through the ports in the side of the kiln.  The ashes are removed through lower ports.  More modern versions of these kilns had external gas piping around the outside of the kiln with burners projecting into the kiln.

After firing, the bricks are removed from the kiln for cooling.  The type of clay and any additives, along with the method of heating determine the coloration and characteristics of the brick.  The heating process  took about two weeks per batch, plus the time for cooling and curing.

My kilns are all commercial products from two different manufacturers with some modifications and added finish.

A little HO model railroad history

I have been recycling my model railroad magazines while cutting out the few articles and photos of interest.  This is part of my reversal of my lifelong accumulation of MRR stuff.  I have finished with MR and RMC and have now started on a long out of print publication called HO Monthly which started up in 1948 and was absorbed into MR about 1961.  The first issue was May 1948 with 20 pages.  It had an interesting HO history by Eric LaNal (the pen name of Alan Lake Rice).  HO came about with a scale of 3.5 mm to the foot because that was half of British O scale, and thus they called it HO - half O scale.  There were many arguments about scale and gauge in those days, so by the end of the 1920's there were two competing scales - OO and HO.  A pioneer in the US, Hugh Boutell, built an HO model railroad called the Marysport and Diddystown. Other HO pioneers by the late 20's included Eric, E.P. Alexander, and George Stock.  Alexander later changed to O scale narrow gauge.  War was waged in the 1930's between the OO's and the HO's.  Couplers were also problematical.  Apparently the now vintage Mantua coupler was based on a design by Eric.  There were a lot of other early details in the article, but we are so well off with what we have in HO and can thank pioneers like them for getting it started.

One early model railroad featured in HO Monthly that I always admired was the New Castle and Frenchtown built by Bart Crosby.  It was about 7 foot square and represented a quaint small town with lots of structures and details.  The famous John Allen soon appeared on their pages with photos of his original railroad.

There were no kits of any kind in HO when these guys started, and in fact many of them became early manufacturers.

Brickworks shipping shed

Below is a small shipping shed I built to hold the brick stacks that are ready for shipping.  The shed projects out over a small embankment to trackside thus at the moment the trackside support posts are not installed as I need to fit them in place.  The shed is all stripwood with a corrugated iron roof.  There are three banded brick stacks on pallets awaiting shipment.  In one of the photos you can see a worker leaning on the shed.  He was made from a modified Plsaticville (I think) figure of a policeman.  I carved off all parts that did not fit the worker and painted and weathered the figure.  Even somewhat crude plastic figures can be made to look decent.

Having fun with this brickworks.

Brickworks track

Since the brickworks site on my layout is a stretch from the edge of the layout I decided to construct the track on my workbench.  I first cut paper strips the width of the ties and layed them out where the track would run.  Then I glued the strips together in the proper configuration creating the roadbed.  The roadbed strips were placed on my workbench.  I cut styrene ties and glued them to the paper roadbed.  I used 2x3 styrene strips for the track and made a simple track gauge to aid in laying the rail.  After the rail was down, I painted the roadbed, ties and rail, then weathered it with chalks.  After all was dried I was able to lift it as one piece and fit it to the brickworks site.  The whole thing weighs almost nothing.

The track plan is simplistic but there is little room on the site.The rail is two foot gauge (between the rails).  After permanent installation the roadbed will be blended with the scenery.