East Broad Top Locomotive Fueling Station - White Ground Model Works

[VagelK]

This is my first-ever build thread.  Building this kit has been on the back burner for many, many years.  Back in the 1980s, White Ground Model Works sold a series of craftsman-style kits for several iconic structures of the East Broad Top Railroad, several of which were no longer standing when the kits were released.  They were a blessing for what was then a tiny group of model railroaders.  By the time I purchased this kit around 1990, White Ground was about to become a 'dot.gone,' so I was fortunate to be able to find it and several others at Tommy Gilbert's Hobby Shop, one of my regular haunts in those days.

Probably the most familiar to anyone who has ever visited the East Broad Top RR National Historic Landmark is the concrete coaling bunker - officially the "locomotive fueling station" - at the south end of the yard in Rockhill, PA.  My model RR layout is home to a freelanced neighbor of the EBT, called the Blacklog & Shade Gap Eastern, and it needed a fueling station at its Richmond Furnace yard.  It's future place was occupied by a mock-up, using a photocopied line drawing from the instructions glued to a piece of shirt stiffener.  By the way, if you haven't already seen it, I did a multi-post layout tour of my Path Valley Lines layout in the Layout Tours area of Modelers Forum in mid-2025, which I invite you to visit.



Below is a picture of the prototype in its original form, as built ca. 1930.  Note that it had only one chute; the two smaller ones on either side of it - familiar to tourist-era visitors - were added later, probably during WW2.  That had a role in my decision to modify the kit as the project continued.



This build thread will be a three-parter, so I'll start with the final result and then go from there.



Here is the kit in the box.  It's essentially a scratch build project with instructions included.  Materials for the RR tie retaining walls were not included, however.  The ones in this build were trimmed from plaster castings kindly donated by a model railroader friend, named Bob Evans, who, sad to say, passed away recently.  Bob was a long-time member and valued contributor to the Ohio Valley Lines club of Ambridge, PA and to many other privately owned layouts in the Pittsburgh region.



I decided to avoid board-by-board construction and focused on capturing the look of the prototype as best I could with more modern materials.  The big fill that surrounds the concrete bunker behind those Hydrocal retaining walls, for example, is layered and shaped insulating foam board, and the corrugated metal sheathing on the bunker roof and engine shed is Evergreen styrene sheet measured and cut per the instruction drawings.



I started by gluing the Hydrocal walls to a piece of blue foam and cutting a template for the footprint of the fill:



And this is where I must pause until the next post.  I hope this attracts some attention.  Let me know if you have seen the prototype and/or have built one of these yourself!

[PRR Modeler]

I'll be following along with interest Vagel. I'm actually visiting EBT in May.

[Zephyrus52246]

What an interesting "locomotive fueling station".  Nice job on the model.  I'll be following. 

Jeff

[ACL1504]

Vagel,

I'm in as well. Great start and great looking kit.

Tom

[deemery]

We don't see much EBT around these parts    This will be an interesting project to watch, I think you're off to a great start.

dave

[Bernd]

Hi Vagel,

I'm another fan of the East Broad Top. Visited the railroad after reading an article in Model Railroader about the line in Pa. So, in the early 1970's I went to see the railroad first hand. Don't pay attention to the date on the picture. It took almost 30 years before computers became popular.



My favorite doodlebug.



And me standing in the M-1 with the model. Wife and I went down for one of their open house tours. We got to go through all the buildings and roam around on the grounds. This was several years ago.



Bill Banta has been putting out kits of the facilities in HO scale. I've been collecting them as they have come out. I asked Bill if he will do the engine house. Perhaps in the future sometime he claimed.



Back in a few with pics of the coal facility that I gathered.

Bernd

[Bernd]

Vagel,

Here are some pics I got of the interent that may help with your locomotive fueling station.

Here's a good view of the construction of the new shed.





SOme views from up high.









These are not my pictures. A guy with a drone copter took these pictures. I forgot his name so can't give credit.

Hope this helps out.

Bernd

[VagelK]

Bernd, thanks for all the pics, and I'm so glad you've been able to visit and become a fan of the EBT.  Looking at some of those drone shots, I guess I'll have to plant a lot more clump foliage on the boney pile! 

But, actually, I'm old enough to remember what it looked like back there at the south end of the yard before the tie timber retaining wall rotted away and allowed the boney fill to cover the rest of that siding track.  I first rode an EBT train in August 1960, at age 4, and not a year went by while I was still in school, that my family didn't go over the mountain to ride the train at least once.  I've been an active member of Friends of the EBT since 1987.  I never in my wildest imagination thought the day would come when it would be restored - but that day is now not far in the future now that the EBT Foundation has come along.

The credit line on the drone shots belongs to Lance Myers, a resident of the Rockhill/Orbisonia area and an employee of the RR, who is also a real fan of the EBT.

Vagel

[Philip]

What a great design for a coaling station. Less labor and more profit!

[PRR Modeler]

Great drone photos.

[deemery]

On the prototype, the ramp up to the dock went to the right?

dave

[VagelK]

Before getting started on The Build, Pt. 2, another comment on Bernd's post:  those Banta kits for the EBT shops complex are wonderful.  Unlike the old White Ground versions - which, I'm pretty sure didn't include the carpentry shop - they build into a full-scale replica of the originals.  The three-bay car shop has a very large footprint; IIRC, it takes three of the White Ground kits to build a full scale version. Plus, the Banta kits don't require one to transfer kit plan drawings to blank scribed siding and marking and cutting window and door openings, so they've got that going for them, as well ...

OK, on with the show ...

Speaking of old kit technology, rather than provide custom castings or 3D printings, "back in the day" White Ground provided several pieces of scale lumber of diverse cross section that allow the modeler (at double the "play value") to use the instruction sheet as a template to fabricate the doors, chute stops, etc. that go into the openings in the Hydrocal wall.  I decided to stain the scale lumber and scribed siding blank for the doors before cutting, trimming, and assembling things using TruColor acrylic "Weathered Gray Wood" thinned with dirty TruColor Thinner:



I then dry brushed the assembled doors with Crimson tube acrylic paint before installing them.  Before installation, 1x8 door frames and had to be cut to fit and glued in place, and the same for the chute stops in the large opening (but not the smaller ones to either side).  Small rectangular pieces of paper from the instruction sheet representing the ends of steel reinforcing bars were cut, painted with TruColor "Aged Rust" and glued onto the wall either side of the center opening.  Results, below:



Some notes on the process of fabrication and installation ... the instructions are fairly well illustrated by HO-scale line drawings and a couple photos of the structure as it was when the kit was developed.  The step-by-step guidelines are in narrative format ... very detailed and logical, but on reflection it's amazing what modelers used to accomplish in the days before craftsman kit instructions were more like 40-page illustrated magazines and one could follow along on YouTube! 

And White Ground left very little room for error ... or lost pieces-parts.  For example, you might note that the scale drawing calls for the modeler to scratch build transoms above each door ... from 2x2" scale lumber.  I opted to close the gap with pieces of scale lumber from my small stock. 

In my defense, I must have misplaced a piece of 2x8 during the 30-odd years this kit has been following me around; there was only enough in the box to frame the doors but not the transom space above it.  And where was the second piece of 2x2 needed make both transoms?  My stock of scale lumber is, shall we say, somewhat lacking.  Off to the hobby shop ... or not.  Fortunately, my knife didn't slip while cutting out the two doors, so I had enough scribed siding left to make, well, a small piece of HO-scale scrap lumber.

Now, I know I'm speaking heresy in a forum for craftsman kit builders.  But, at the end of the day, the finished product will reside at the back of a railroad yard, 2-1/2 feet from the edge of the layout, and other modifications were already planned based on my pre-build parts inventory and inspection.

Before moving on to those modifications, I decided to procrasti ... er, work on the tie timber retaining wall extensions and the boney (Broad Top-speak for gob, slag, or culm) fill.  I trimmed the extensions from a plaster casting donated by a visitor to an open house a number of years ago, then stained them with diluted india ink.  That was followed by darkening the fill between the ties with thinned flat black enamel and drybrushing the ties with TruColor "Weathered Gray Wood" before LocTit-ing them in place.  The image, below, shows them in progress ... I guess I Loctited the one on the right after staining but before finishing it with the paints:



The kit calls for the bunker to be built up with pieces of 1/8"-thick plywood, individually marked off and cut into bunker-like shapes per scale drawings from the square blanks provided.  This would result in an HO-scale bunker for curious viewers to gaze down into, were they able to lean over the layout at a suitably high angle at the previously stated 2-1/2 feet from the aisle. But, as I wrote in Pt. 1, my version was built onto a fill of solid insulating foam, so all things considered, the top of the bunker in this version is represented by black paint and a strip styrene "concrete" curb topped with a section of weathered Code 70 flextrack.  Along the way, I had also found it necessary to trim the top of the fill above the bunker, so I added a piece of .060 x .250 styrene inside the bottom of the trackside wall of the car shed to represent the top of the bunker protruding from the fill (arrow):



Finally, it was time to bite the bullet and move onto the crux of the project:  the metal chutes and appurtenances.  And here I knew there would be trouble:



I mean, LOOK at those castings!  Except for the plastic "iron" counterweights they're a mess ... again, my hat is off to modelers of old.  At one point, and this was my reason for putting this step off for as long as I could, I planned to fabricate the chute axle brackets and shelf brackets from styrene shapes.  But in the end, I decided to try and salvage what I could from these blobs ... after all, they'll be 2-1/2 ... but I'm repeating myself.

I first gently - very carefully, as I noticed that one of the axles on a small chute was broken off IN THE BOX - reduced the thickness of the axles for the large chute using a fine sanding wand.  When I had gone as far as I dared, I chose the two least Rubenesque axle brackets and drilled .060 trial holes.  Finding them too tight to fit the axle, I re-drilled with an .080 bit and achieved success.



And, here, again, I must pause until next post.  Was I successful with the brackets for the smaller chutes?  Did I go mad and become an evil villain holding the HO-scale kit world hostage with a giant Xacto No. 12?  Tune in next time ...

[VagelK]

On the prototype, the ramp up to the dock went to the right?

The ramp went down to the right (RR south).  The ramp was originally built for shifting loads of cleaned coal to the tipple for the beehive coke ovens of the blast furnaces of Rockhill Iron & Coal Co., located behind (east of) the concrete fuel station, which, in turn, replaced a wooden fueling trestle located about 50 yds. to its left (RR north), that had been reached via a switchback from the coke oven tipple spur.

[PRR Modeler]

Great job so far. It's definitely a different modeling world now.

[deemery]

Will you be running track up to the top of the coal station, so that'll be a operations car spot on your railroad?

dave