How to Make a Cement Plant for Model Train Layout

"On behalf of Expert Village my name is Bob Lanning. I'm here to tell you about making a train diorama in HO scale. The Phoenix Cement Company here was actually constructed in 1959 to make concrete for the Glen Canyon Dam in northern Arizona. This is made from a commercial kit and we made it to fit our area. We were able to take the buildings and move them around. You can see the little round kiln in the front and all the storage areas. That is actually a much larger facility but it represents the area very well. You can see all the vehicles and people in the area and a train sitting there ready to pick up the cement to go into hopper cars. Up on the hill we have the town of Hopewell which was only built as a transfer point where the ore was dropped down to the Hopewell tunnel and taken to a transfer point and transferred to the standard gage cars down into Carpdale. That town, of course, no longer exists but it had its own school, there was even a little rail car that ran up there from Carpdale that carried people back and forth, and I think there was a couple of thousand people there at one time. The structure used a wire which was the original way of hauling the ore out before the railroad ran. It was hauled out and put in these buckets and mules would pull the buckets down and of course they would go back up by themselves and that's just kind of a little historical thing we show how the ore use to be carried down. We actually have the earlier eras and the later ways of moving the ore out and the way we built these are just by photographs. We built these out of wood, these little transfers and pullies and just used thin string and wire and the buckets are actually made out of shell casings but they look like the buckets that were used. It's really not too accurate but it gives a general overall feel of the way that things use to work."