I would like to know my fellow members eperiecnes and suggestions for running my new steel mill layout.
If you have some photos of your new steel mill layout, or some background info on which parts of steelmaking you're planning to include, it would probably generate some comments and questions.
I spent almost four decades in the steel industry, and, for the most part of it, enjoyed it immensely. The company for which I worked had several sites in my hometown of Hamilton, Ontario, and several others in surrounding cities in Ontario and elsewhere in Canada, too.In the '70s, the workforce expanded from about 12,500, to 25,000 (I do wonder about that second number, as it seems exaggerated to me), and the mill in which I spent the majority of my career was rolling 3,000,000 tons a year.
Wayne
To my knowledge the NMRA is still selling the authorized re-issue of Dean Freytag's book on steel and modeling steel mills that he wrote for Walthers when they first released their line of steel mill models. Just about anything Freytag wrote would be of interest and use, and that includes the Cyclopedia of Industrial Modeling that he wrote for, I believe, Plastruct. It turns out to be mostly steel mill modeling. I believe there are also some Morning Sun color books on steel mill railroading.
The only steel mill I have railfanned was Northwestern Steel & Wire in Sterling IL. It was served by the C&NW and the Burlington Northern and had its own railroad operation as well. What was remarkable was that in 1980 it was still using steam locomotives: ex-Grand Trunk Western 0-8-0s that had been sent there to be scrapped, as were the steam locomotives of many midwestern railroads. Northwestern S&W was an electric furnace operation, meaning it made steel out of scrap steel, as opposed to the traditional integrated steel mill that makes steel out of raw materials including iron ore.
An electric arc furnace has the advantage to the modeler that they are somewhat smaller -- sometimes called mini mills but I can tell you that NS&W in Sterling was enourmous -- tend to have a narrower product line, and because it does not use iron ore it does not get located along bodies of water as do so many (but not all) integrated mills. So gondolas of scrap as incoming loads, the small ingot cars that steel mills transport within the plant complex, and maybe shipping steel products out by rail.
Dave Nelson
Good suggestion DoctorWayne. Below is an excel spreadsheet with all of the buildings that will be on my layout. The north plant is complete with all buildings in place and I am currently wiriing its tracks,
Dave's comments on a mini-mill are a good suggestion for a steel-mill layout. I started to build an HO scale blast furnace, working from blueprints supplied by my employer. The further I got into it, the more I began to realise that the model would overwhelm the rest of my layout: The casthouse and furnace would have had a 9' square footprint, and once the stoves, gas washers and baghouses were included, the whole shebang would be close to twenty square feet.
Here's a company photo of the Universal Slabbing Mill where I worked...
I decided that a small steel plant was not what I wanted, and eventually dismantled the unfinished furnace and cast house.The only survivor was originally intended to be one of the two cranes for the casthouse, but I modified the one to better-ressemble some of the ones which I operated in my own mill...
How do you plan to connect this to railroad operations? It sounds like you have good plans for making the models and the layout, but after it's built, how does the railroad fit into it? I not sure if there's enough to maintain long-term interest.
It takes an iron man to play with a toy iron horse.
There is a connection from the mill to the 10 track yard which also has service facilities for both locomotives and cars. There will be staging tracks from the yard to the rest of the world going north. There will staging tracks beyond the south plant going south when it is built.
BTW: I am looking to purchase a second blast furnace. One will serve the EAF the second the BOF.
caldreamerBTW: I am looking to purchase a second blast furnace. One will serve the EAF the second the BOF.
If you're referring to the Walthers blast furnace kit, you should be aware that in many respects, it's better-suited to an N scale layout....the furnace itself is extremely small for HO scale.
Below is a not-very-legible aerial view of the Hilton Works in Hamilton, Ontario, on an over1,000 acre site. There were also several other large mills belonging to the same company in different parts of the city.
Your list of structures and associated facilities wouldn't fit into my 1200sq.ft. basement.
Wayne:
I am using the HO scale blast furnace which scales out at 286 1/2 feet in N scale. That is about right since the real blast furnaces tower over every other building in a steel mill.
I've driven truck to a few steel mills in my early trucking career. Late seventies and early eighties. Steel mills and rolling mills were the rare examples of the guard at the gate giving me a map to where I needed to go. When you have to get a map, you know the place is huge. Just the rolling mill had to be a half mile wide and a mile long if not longer. And that was not the largest structure. They had the best crane operators, very smooth and gentle for what they were moving and setting.
Good luck with your endeavors. Even in N scale you would need a gymnasium to model a whole facility.
Pete.
Pete:
A gymnasium would not be big enough. As you stated one mill is a mile long which is 33 feet in scale. I figure more like an Amazon or Walmart warehouse would have enough space for all of the buildings in steel mill.
But to one extent or another this size problem is true for nearly any industry or customer big enough to be rail served -- and/or have its own rail operations -- in the modern era. And by modern I don't mean just 21st century. Guys have meat packing plants, tanneries, Ford motors factories, and all manner of industries that end up being seriously, even laughably, compressed.
For that matter our freight yards, passenger terminals, and engine service facilities are greatly compressed too. As are our trains, for the most part, in length that is.
The best we can do is approximate or give the illusion of size. Dean Freytag talks about this in his book on steel.