Dumb question - re: Blue Coal Depot

Not a dumb question, just a strange model. Whatever its prototype, it is severly compressed. It looks like a storage/loading building for a coal or gravel plant. Internally, it would have bins, and conveyors to bring different sized coal/gravel to the loading chute(s) and dump it into the hopper. There should be a conveyor from a crusher plant, which in turn would be connected to the mine with another conveyor, or be served by conveyors from raw material piles. As is, the model is of course far too small to be serviced by rail. Bashing three or four of these into a row could make a credible plant, though.

It's not a mine-head structure, though you could fake it into one by removing the railroad loading dock extension, and running a conveyor from it to a crusher/storage unit. Adding a hoist tower with a nice large rotating wheel would help create the illusion. Coal is sold in different sizes for different purposes, hence the crusher/sorting/loading plant.

You could also reverse the flow, so to speak: put spur in behind the building, where hoppers of coal/gravel will be unloaded by a handy underground conveyor system, which you don't have to model (bonus!) Change the front loading extension around a bit to make it a truck loading spot, and call the result a coal dealer. Selling Blue Coal, of course (there really was "Blue Coal" brand, see

OTOH, the kit has decent parts, and could be bashed into a variety of different plants. You could bash it into two or three smaller "industrial" structures, add loading docks on one or both sides, and receive product by rail and distribute it locally by truck. Or call it a factory. Or whatever.

Some of the Model Power kits are freelanced, a few are "based on" actual structures, some of them are copied from structures built by the lat E L Moore, who had a talent for combing all kinds of unlikely bits and pieces into something that looked industrial. I never build one as designed. I like them because they a) they are cheap; and b) they have lots of parts that can be combined in ways that suit my sense of the possible, if not the probable. ;-)

Wolf K.

There are two different models. The newer one looks credible as a a coal dealer to me. My previous post referred to the older model.

Wolf K.

That's cool - I have the older model. Bought it, as near as I can recall, about 20 years ago.