Checking Accuracy of Model Train Villages

Video Transcript

"On behalf of Expert Village, my name is Bob Lanning and I’m here to tell you about how we’re making model villages. Historical accuracy is important to us on this diagram here because the museum is good enough to let us put this diorama here. We have overlapping areas as you can see, these little buckets on these little A-frames that was how the ore originally got down, with mules pulling the buckets. And after that, the ore was dropped down out of Jerome to a shaft and you can see the tunnel in the background where the ore came out to the transfer station and was transferred to the standard gauge train which was switched down to Clarksdale from there. The village of Hopewell was where the transfer station was and at one time there was quite a few homes out there and even a school, and this is all abandoned now and the mines closed down. All that’s left up there is the power station which you see up near the tunnel, and of course the tunnel which is dangerous now because it’s flooded with water, but nothing else is left of the site of the old town of Hopewell. Originally the mines were shaft mines and the smelter was in Jerome. It was fires in the shafts which are hard to put out, so eventually they decided to make a open pit mine, the trouble was, is where the ore was is right underneath the smelter at the time so that’s when the decision was to make the town of Clarksdale and actually make an open pit mine because the shafts were dangerous and you could see the open pit there with the large shovel to load up the trains that would take it to the, drop it down the shafts and the ore would come down to the loose smelter in Clarksdale which was built about 1915. "