ross31s wrote:
The combine is going to be used to haul mine workers at the start / end of shifts - otherwise in using the caboose conversion of the full baggage car. And im not hauling dilithium, its trilithium, which just hapens to be a rusty iron ore colour.
Mines a small mining concern with the loaded trains running downhill andway (bar the breif grade just out of the sorting yard) so i am assuming i could probably get away with slightly heavier trains by fitting another brake pump to the Decapod or using my Baldwin 4-6-0 as a pilot.
If it's iron ore operations you're modelling, you'll need to re-think a number of things.
For one thing, miners in ore country lived near the mines. Here in Minnesota those sites were called "locations", unincorporated small villages built right next to the mine. Miners walked to work, they didn't ride in a combine or coach behind an ore train. Remember the mainline railroads were a separate company from the mining company, although both might have the same parent co. like United States Steel. The Roundhouse three window caboose or side-door caboose are fairly close to Missabe cabooses and would be a good choice.
The 2-10-0's built in the US for the Russian Imperial Rys. (and which were not allowed to be shipped by Pres. Wilson after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917) were generally grabbed up by railroads like the Minneapolis Northfield and Southern that had lightweight track and needed the weight of the engine spread out over 10 driving wheels. By that time, iron ore haulers like the Duluth Missabe and Northern, Duluth and Iron Range and Great Northern were using big 2-10-2's, 2-8-8-2's and other mallets on mainline ore trains. (Soo Line did use a 2-10-0 for moving ore up and down the ore docks, both in MN and Wisconsin.) 4-6-0's had been used on ore trains in the 1880's-90's but were replaced by 2-8-0's and 2-8-2's and mallets. A 2-10-0 might have been used on a "mine run", a train of 30-40 ore cars running between a marshalling yard and a local mine's yard.
Ore trains ran both up and down hill!! Yes on the Missabe ore trains from Proctor yards had to run downhill to get to the ore docks in Duluth; but on other railroads the trip to the ore dock was uphill. Plus on the ore cars in Proctor yard had come their via a roller-coaster up and down mainline...it wasn't unusual for the engine and front cars to be going downhill, while the middle of the ore train was going uphill, and the caboose and rear of the train going uphill!!
There were instances of railroads using a helper engine for part of an ore train's trip (NP for example had a steep grade getting out of Duluth/Superior) but generally ore trains ran with one engine. If they needed to doublehead, they'd usually end up buying a bigger engine that could do it by itself.
You might want to consider modelling an ore company railroad, like Hanna Mining etc. Running shorter cuts of cars down a pit or up to the loading area of an underground mine. Sometimes these roads loaded cars directly into the mainline railroad's car, other times they loaded the raw ore into side-dump cars that would dump the ore into a beneficiator - an ore cleaner - which would then load the processed ore into the mainline ore jennies. Up until the taconite era, the mainline (DM&IR, GN) railroads never ran trains directly to the mine pits.
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