As summer begins (along with my retirement) my next project is another mine, tentatively called the Bitter Creek 2.
This is going to be a scratchbuild, based on a two-part series by Allen J Brewster that ran in Model Railroader Magazine in 1975. His model was based on plans of a mine in Leadville, Colorado that appeared in Slim Gauge News in 1972. I have copies of all three magazines.
I built this mine in HO scale back around 1980, for an HOn3 shelf layout that I had in our apartment. The pictures are scanned from slides I took at the time. The model was damaged at some point and most of it was discarded or broken up for parts. I think I still have the ore bin in a box somewhere.
I've worked up a supply list, and in the last couple of days I ordered some supplies: corrugated roofing and a mine chute mechanism from Wild West Models; Tichy doors, windows, and nut-bolt-washer castings; a Grandt Line bullwheel; and some stripwood.
When I built my HO model I used Northeastern milled board-and-batten siding. This time I'm going to closely follow Brewster's construction method, building a core from mattboard, then applying prestained individual boards and battens.
I have the stripwood I need to build the ore bin, and probably enough NBW castings, so I'll start there while I wait for the other stuff to arrive.
I will probably build a temporary foam-based diorama for this, as I did with the recent depot build, but eventually this will become the centerpiece of the new Frazier Borate layout. Here's the latest version of that track plan:
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