My brass foundry in Ballard

From time to time, I post short descriptions of the industries on my layout, what they do, and how they form part of operating sequences. Today my subject is the Union Brass foundry in my layout town of Ballard. As a physical metallurgist before retirement, and who did thesis research on copper and brass, this is an industry I understand.

The building itself is built without much change from a Classic Miniatures kit, including the signage on the building front. But because the building front is oriented perpendicular to the layout edge and thus a little hard to read, I added the larger sign over the loading dock. This dock, by the way, was enlarged from the rather narrow one in the original kit. The model of the building represents a wood false front made to look like stone, something common in the century preceding the one I model. 

From the other side, you can see the furnace room addition. Also evident below is the near proximity on the right of the Jupiter Pump & Compressor facility. The idea here is that the brass foundry came into existence to supply brass plumbing parts for Jupiter.  

Part of what’s interesting about this building is the loads that are shipped in and out of it. Inbound may be bulk copper (and the foundry makes up the brass composition by adding zinc) or brass bar stock. Plumbing fixtures are shipped out, not only to Jupiter but to customers elsewhere. Sample waybills are shown below.

At left you see an inbound load of copper bar, shipped from Cananea in Mexico. As often happened at the Southern Pacific’s port of entry at Nogales, Arizona, Spanish language waybills were replaced by SP ones and the previous SP de Mexico waybill number shown (you can click to enlarge). The bill also shows that the car cleared customs at Nogales. At right is an outbound shipment bill, with a Transcontinental Freight Bureau weight agreement stamp on it.

Many loads arrive and depart in ordinary box cars, but an option is an occasional foreign box car, and I mean lierally foreign, from Mexico. The waybill shown above for an ASX car is the result of a custom decorated model years ago by Bev-Bel for a car owned by American Smelting & Refining (Asarco) in Mexico, and accordingly with dimensional and other data in metric as well as English units. 

I shouldn’t leave the impression that raw materials for this foundry come only from Mexico; the heart of the copper and brass businss in the 1950s, which I model, was in Connecticut, and this foundry more commonly receives loads from Bridgeport Brass (in Bridgeport) or Chase Brass & Copper (in Waterbury). 

This industry is different from others on the layout, in part because though it is a small structure, it also produces small parts in a simple casting process, and thus can realistically output carloads of product. So often on layouts (including my own) our models of industries are far too small to do the work we imagine them doing. This one is at least a little better in that regard.

Tony Thompson