The ironminers have recently acquired their first official restoration project, an early 1900s WATT side dump ore car!! the ore car is complete except for the dump body which is missing, so the hunt is on for a V shaped dump body that is 5'7'' long!! the car will need new bearings to get back rolling smoothly down the track and will get treated to a new paint job in semi flat black after decades of rusting out in the element. history on the ore car according to the previous owner is that it was last used somewhere in north western CT in the early 1900s! now it will haul ore once again!

Yup this will be a fun project to get going. I've been kicking along for a while to recreate a Hibernia Mine car, but this would serve as a good starting point for IronMiners.. I think our biggest problem right now is trying to determine what the correct dump body would be for this car. There are the V shaped dump body ore cars like used at the slate quarry and the U shaped ore cars ones like used at Sterling Hill, Beach Glenn, some other coal mines like D&D, Porter Tunnel, etc. This really would be an important part of making this ore car correct. Being into cars and other things like that, I generally like to see things done correctly to have the correct appearance. Putting the wrong dump body on the car just wouldn't give the car justice.

Miner Greg

I am still searching our archives to see if they had a U-shaped dump body for that style frame so far it is just the V-style which in reality was the most common.

One thing that will need to be researched in some way is how the mine transported the ore. It is possible that they had 18' ga ore cars working in the mine & transferred the ore outside to the 30" ga car for processing hence the possibility for the v-style body. The U-shape style were typically used in close clearance situations for the most part.

A second possibility that car was used to transfer the junk rock from the mill to the gob piles. 30" ga gave it a larger capacity for the waste rock. A hoist may have been in use to pull this car up a slope to the top of the pile

I hope this helps a little.

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Pioneering the next INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION (Preservation ! ). . . Saving equipment (1) mine site at a time.

That one you're thinking of was at D&F... I should have a photo or two of that somewhere. I know krenzel does.

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This ain't longwall... this is long hole!

these?

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-Thou shalt not little vein-