@Dee

Dee,

I've used Arizona Rock & Mineral for ballast quite a bit, and like it a lot.  I also have on hand, but not yet used, their "paving material" (concrete and also asphalt).  Looking forward to trying that stuff out soon.  I have never used their coal, nor any idea regarding slate gravel; sorry.

Their contact info is on their website:

http://rrscenery.com/?page_id=50

Al Carter

AZ R & M

I use their products and they seem easy to work with and hold the color. I have an order in to try the asphalt material and while I have never tried the concrete I do have a bag. The industrial dirt is what I like the best as it looks so good, IMO, to me. I have played around with all sorts of dirt making including real and this stuff just looks consistently good. I thought they had a sample package so you could try it out but the mind does slip as u age! The ballast is real so it just needs a good soak. 

Rrscenery.com is the website and there clearly is a phone number and  email address and their twitter and FB info. If you contact them he should be able to help with the slate. 

Tom

Dee, that's all I use on my

Dee, that's all I use on my railroad.

AR&M is the best...real rock not walnut chips.

Barry

I think they have a new website?

I can't get the rrscenery.com site to load (via PC nor phone). But via the wayback machine I found their FaceBook page and on there it shows https://armballast.com/ being their new (?) website with a new logo as well.

On the wayback machine, the contact info is archived as follows, while the new website doesn't seem to list any contact info (yet):

Crazy

I was unaware of the new website. Why would a company leave out the contact information? Both sites are loading for me on my IPadPro and yes the cookies were cleaned out since the last visit to the rrscenry site address.

Tom

I think he might of sold the

I think he might of sold the company,  at one point it was for sale.  He was wanting to retire or something like that,  I bought a lot of ballast at that time. in case something changed.

Call the number and ask....

*grrr* Comcraptic...

I found out why rrscenery.com wasn't loading for me: the DNS resolvers of my ISP (Comcast) can't resolve the name for whatever unknown reason. I hard coded IP addresses for the OpenDNS servers in my Internet router, instead of relying on Comcast to dynamically provide me with their malfunctioning DNS server IP addresses.

Back to browsing ballast for the NS...

Package Label

Dee, I purchased some coal from AR&M several months ago they still have their website.

https://armballast.com/

Hope this helps,

Bill

@Bill, So coal that goes into

@Bill,

So coal that goes into the tender would be "Stoker" coal and "lump" would be for coal hoppers?

@Yaron, Thanks for the

@Yaron,

Thanks for the contact info!

@Al Carter, Let us know how

@Al Carter,

Let us know how the paving material works for you. Thanks for the link!

@Tom, Do you have any pics to

@Tom,

Do you have any pics to share of your use of the industrial dirt? Thanks for the link.

Thanks!

Thanks for posting this information!   I have been running low and could not get the old web site to work.  Whew!

Deemiorgos

Matches very well to the dirt in the pulp yard in Central Wi. However, I only have an IPhone to shoot pictures and believe me, it is much more brown then this picture just taken. Sorry.

One more

Tom

Ooh! I like that look

Ooh! I like that look Tom.

I'm wondering I could get that look in a darker colour to depict shale gravel and its dust. I want to redo my team track lot (left lower part of the image) with a look of newly laid shale gravel.

Dee

Why darker, that looks very good to me. Do u have a sample to match? 

Tom

Coal Sizes

@Deemiorgos said:

The answer is maybe, yes and no - for both...

There's a couple of sites around that list coal sizes by name - here's a couple:

http://www.dccguy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Coal-sizes.pdf

https://coalpail.com/coal-heating-encyclopedia/anthracite-coal-sizes

The coal that I remember going into #33's tender was varied, with the largest chunks being maybe 8" - though it went all the way down to dust (slack). Coal that is hand shoveled tends to be on the larger side. Locomotives that use stokers have crushers in the mechanism to break the coal down to a size that will feed consistently off the distributing plate - so the coal size probably wasn't that important - as long as it would drop into the auger. I suspect railroads bought whatever was cheapest as long as it otherwise met their heat, ash and other requirements. Long distance passenger engines, for example, would get hotter coal (for high steam generation) with less ash - ashpan capacity being one of the factors that limited the distance a locomotive could run without servicing. 

Coal in hoppers is sized to fit whoever the customer is. Retail coal dealers may order different sizes for domestic use - the larger sizes for (again) hand firing stoves, smaller and more consistently sized coals being used for stoker-fed domestic furnaces. Slack and run of mine sizes were less expensive - the first because it was too small to stay on a grate (so a lot of waste) and I suspect there was also a higher percentage of dirt mixed in with it. Run of mine was less expensive because it didn't have to be sized (and maybe not cleaned - though I don't know that) at the mine site. 

Later industrial furnaces would crush coal down to a powder so it could be injected into the firebox - combusting as it went (like a liquid fuel).

If you model modern times, your 100 ton gondolas will have coal loads that are very consistent and relatively small - it's going to one industrial consumer. In my modeling period (mid-thirties), a train could have a different grade in every car that is very apparent in photos. As an aside, the cars in coal trains were rather varied during that era - a good mix of various sized (length and height) gondolas and hoppers, again depending on the customer. Some dealers may not have the ability to unload hoppers, for example - so they would get gondolas.

@Tom I want to go for this

@Tom

I want to go for this look for the team track lot, but a little darker.

Also looking for ideas to create a chipnseal road behind the depot.

@Matt, Thank you so much for

@Matt,

Thank you so much for the informative reply. A keeper indeed.

Thanks for the links!

Dee

Cannot wait to see the results as that darker shade looks great.

AzR&M hasn’t shipped to my LHS. My dealer called to check the delay and were told the Winter made collecting the materials difficult and currently they were “blasting”.

I have a transload yard that seems too bright and when I finish the area I am working on around Memorial Day in the USA, I am going to try weathering the gravel yard. I think some Pan Pastels can knock down the brightness and make the surface seemed used. Never tried it before and if it doesn’t work, I’ll try Vallejo with an airbrush. I think there are lots of possibilities once we have the gravel/ballast down.

Tom

@Deemiorgos re: team track lot

I have used Arizona Rock and Mineral n-scale Copper Range Railroad, no 134-1 for a gravel lot.  To my eyes, it looks like a good match to the photo you posted for the look you would like to achieve for the team track lot.  I applied it with diluted white glue, which darkened the rock a bit. In the future I will also put some 134-0 finer rock powder in places on the gravel lot to simulate some of the gravel being crushed down by vehicles.  I model HO scale, but the 134-2 HO scale version of this rock seemed too large for my gravel lot.  The brownish and greenish areas you see in the first photo are little patches of ground foam to simulate some weeds and dirty areas.  Not sure if I am happy with that part- work in progress.

regards, Dennis

Why would a company leave out their contact information?

Sometimes they have a website redesign and the person doing the redesign flubs it.   Just that simple, nothing shady at all.

A couple years back, I was trying to hunt down a particular issue of an out-of-print ship modeling magazine, specifically because it had an article about the ship my father served on and I wanted to build a model of it.  The one site I found had it - but there was no way to order any merchandise from them or way to contact the owners.  I dug around in the internet archives, found an earlier copy of their website with the address of their brick-and-mortar shop and an email address, and sent them an email letter including my email address describing what I was looking for and why I couldn't order on-line.  

I received a very nice email from them thanking me for pointing out the problem with their website.  They had just returned from holiday after hiring someone to revamp their website before they left, and were wondering why on-line sales had dropped to zero.  The web designer had left out those lines of code that provided the email links and links to the shopping cart page.

PS: I got the magazine, packaged in a bulletproof package, and in pristine condition even though it had been advertised as "used".  And another letter thanking me for pointing out the problem with their website.

Janet N.

It's there. Look deeper. Scroll all the way down,

there's a link to a PDF at the bottom left of the page "Product Line Sheet"; on the PDF you'll find all the contact info.  Bizarre, I agree, they couldn't have worked much harder to avoid giving it, but it can be found. 

Blair