Modeling the Mine #5 Fan House

 

The original purpose of the East Broad Top Railroad was to transport coal and iron ore to the iron furnaces at Rockhill.  When the iron furnaces closed early in the twentieth century, the railroad continued to carry coal, but not to Rockhill Furnace.  Coal was mined on the east slope of Broad Top Mountain, some 32 miles south of the EBT's northern terminus at Mount Union.  There it was washed, cleaned, sorted, and transferred to standard gauge hopper cars destined for the steel mills of Pittsburgh and Steelton.  

By the 1950's, the Broad Top was a maze of tunnels and surface mines.  Mining coal was both dirty and dangerous.  Miners working far below the surface needed to have methane and other gases pumped out of the tunnels and fresh air pumped in.  One of the few surviving structures from those days is the fan house pictured above.  Constructed of cinder blocks, it contained an electric motor that drove the huge fan still visible in the ruins today.  Here is another photo, taken a few years earlier.

 My East Broad Top model railroad is set around the end of common carrier operations, in the late 1940s and early 1950s.  The fan, located between the tipples for mines #1 and #5, was a short distance west of the EBT main line.  I had a spot picked out for this unique structure, but there were few photos of it in operation, and scratch building it seemed difficult at best.

Then I discovered a 3D laser engraved basswood kit of the fan house from Monster Modelworks.  It was a simple build with four walls and a couple of large screened openings for air, all of which created a structure only 2.89" by 3.5" by 2.65" high.  Construction took just a couple of nights.  After assembling the walls, I spray painted them with a dark gray color.  After the paint dried, I brushed on Pan Pastel neutral gray shade, that highlighted the cinder blocks.  The base was painted with some leftover Floquil aged concrete applied with a brush.  Frames for the screens, a wooden door, and shingles for the roof were laser cut with an adhesive backing.  The result came out better than I had hoped.

 

 

 

 

I placed the finished structure in a wooded area not far from Mine #1 and next to a surface mine, which were rather common after the underground mines began to close down.