Quarry Walls

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Railroads were invented to help make mining easier, and the relationship between mines and railroads has continued to this day.  On a model railroad, a quarry or open pit mine is one of the best, most realistic sources of traffic.

Whether it’s a gravel producer, a decorative stone quarry, or a cement plant, all that rock has to come from somewhere.  And the rock surfaces in those places look different from the rock surfaces we see elsewhere.

In active quarries, the rock surfaces are always fresh, and often perfectly straight.  Every day, people are drilling rows of holes in the rock, filling them with explosives, and blasting new material loose.  Weathering rarely gets a chance to work for very long.  Often, you can even see where the holes were drilled in the rock for the last blast.

One odd thing about active quarries is that they often have a similar appearance regardless of what is being mined.  We offer two castings to model these sharp, angular rock faces.  

Quarry 1 is a nice, simple, flat vertical wall.  It’s perfectly at home in any scale, as the backdrop to a cement plant or a crushed stone plant.  You can model a building stone quarry, too.  The blocks are big enough to look right sawed and cut into blocks for sculptors or architects.  Dimensions are 21 by 7 inches.

For a bigger mine, try Quarry Wall, which measures 28 by 10 inches, and is about 4 inches deep.  Here, we’ve taken the same blocky breakage pattern and gotten a little more ambitious.  We’ve modeled the stair-step shape of a wall that’s in the process of advancing into the rock.  We’ve even modeled the blast holes!

The two quarry pieces are engineered so that they fit together seamlessly, as you can see here.

So what does this mine produce?  Well, that’s up to you and your paint.  Limestone quarries are often battleship gray, with just a hint of light tan along the bedding planes and joints.  Limestone’s cousin, marble, is often an off-white color, with very little coloring along the joints (too much coloring would mean that the marble is of low purity, and would discolor over time—not the sort of thing that sculptors or architects would want).  Granite quarries can show a bit of speckling from their light and dark crystals.  Spray and brush-on paints are now available to produce this effect.