Home made coal load

First: great modeling, looks almost real!

Why almost? Loaded hoppers tend not to be completely full. For a load like that, it would take hand packing around the edges or a lot of spilled coal. It would also create a possibly dangerous situation with coal coming off the load while in motion.

Look at this picture of a coal load in a hopper:



The coal doesn't come all of the way up the side of the car. The pile in the middle is higher than the edges , but at the edges (least at the front and back of the car) it is clearly lower.

Small nit-picky thing I know and certainly offered with no intent to diminish the modeling effort which is really very good.

Years ago, coal was just piled into the hopper until it hit the weight limit and away the train went! Spillage over the side and dust was not considered.

Now the RRs are finding that the dust is ruining the track and wheels and the bearings on the car. The customer is also concerned about not getting the weight of material they paid to be shipped. The RRs are experimenting with various methods of reducing the losses to the customer and the damage to their property. They are combing the loads and shaping it to reduce loss, dust and wind resistance. They are using various chemical coatings over the load to glue it together and smooth the surface.

One thing odd that I have noticed is that the upper surface of the load is an odd shape.

If you consider the shape of the modern coal car you will notice that the lower portion of the ends are sloped toward the area between the ends starting at about half of the cars height, down to about the height of the truck. This leaves a large area on each end of the car that is not used to carry the product. I can understand the sloped ends if it is a bottom dump car, but even the rotary dump are shaped this way.

If you look down on the load from the top you will notice that is has the same shape as the car, but inverted. The upper surface of the coal load starts at each end about half way up the height of the car and slopes up toward the middle of the car. Crossways to the car the upper surface is a gentle curve, but end to end there are these steep slopes on the each end.

The highest point in the load extends above the height of the sides of the car, but at the very ends of the car you can see the metal bottom of the car at the start of the slope! It seems there is plenty of room in the ends to take all the coal that is above the rim of the car sides and tuck it neatly down below the rim, and thus out of the air stream over the car.