Rainbows in the Lehigh Valley Gorge

[TMo]

While I'm waiting for glue to dry that adheres the grass to my scenery around the maintenance shed, I started thinking about the other area of my layout yet to be addressed lying between the backdrop and the tracks - that being the leadup from Black Creek toward the city of Hazleton.

   

Hazleton, along with Wilkes Barre, and Scranton was an anthracite boom town.  When hard coal was found in the region and once someone harnessed the secret to getting it to combust, anthracite was a huge source of heating for the cities of the northeast.  In the folds of the Appalacians, in many cases it was only necessary to remove the topsoil to find the black diamonds.  Many northeastern railroads profitted by this discovery and shipped millions of tons of the stuff to Philadephia, New York, Buffalo, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Boston and Washington, D.C.  The Reading, the Lehigh Valley, the Erie Lackawanna, the Pennsylvania, the Lehigh and New England, the Lehigh and Hudson River, the Delaware and Hudson, the CNJ all had a hand in moving the coal.  The establishment of the interstate highway system killed the passenger traffic for each of these lines, but the evaporation of the hard coal market really drove all of these railroads toward bankruptcy and the formation of Conrail.

Hard coal was notoriously chunky - some mined coal pieces weighed more than 3 tons, and before it could be sent to markets, the coal had to be broken into "shovelable" pieces.  Coal breakers were born.  I've heard that these giant structures dotted northeastern Pennsylvania and numbered nearly 400 during the boom days of hard coal.  The coal was elevated from the strip mines into the top of the building (usually about 100 feet off of the ground), where it was sorted and ground with machinery until it was small enough to load in coal hoppers.  These buildings were massive, dirty, dusty, loud and employed hundreds of people.  Vintage photograph of the Woodward coal breaker in Kingston : r/Pennsylvania (reddit.com)

When hard coal went sour, so did the towns and the breakers.  The last to be torn down was the Eckley in 2014.  Since railroads were so important to the breakers, many were built right over the tracks to load coal.  I'm going to take advantage of that.  On my layout, Hazleton is right at the entry/exit to my storage level, and right now, I have a big hole right through my blue curved backdrop where trains emerge and disappear.  I've been pondering how I can hide that hole, and my current thought is to build the semi-facade of a breaker right over that area to both hide the entry into the storage area and resolve the back corner of the backdrop where it turns into the wall of my office.

   

I'm going to be fooling around with building orientation, so I'm going to resort to building a cardboard cut out to see how it might look and it may jog a few thoughts for details of the structure.  This thing's going to be a complete kitbash - it may be another thing that takes a while, but I think that's what energizes me in this hobby.  Big challenges are elephants that have to be eaten one piece at a time.  More (of course) to follow.