Layouts and layout building

Justin:

 Please post photos as you make progress - I for one am very interested in how your mill turns out!

Here is a pic of my paper mill design so far. At the moment i am trying to figure out how to add parts of the Northern Island refinery to the design. I also am looking at rotary kilns to modify the drum off of the Valley cement into a paper mill kiln.   Tell me what you think and if you have any sugestions.

The paper mill sits on two 6 foot by 4 1/2 foot HO corners

Had a problem getting the pic posted so here is a link to it

[img=http://img13.imagevenue.com/loc902/th_38929_Paper_Mill_design_122_902lo.jpg]

Justin:

 That plan looks like a lot of fun!  I'm glad to see you have a major smokestack - those are often the feature you see first about a big mill (the one I worked at had a main polution control stack that was 300 feet tall, made of tapered concrete.  I once modeled it using a tapered round coffee table leg from a millwork store.  It had the perfect shape and proportion, and looked good once I had painted it weathered gray with red and white stripes at the top).

Good luck with your plan, and keep up posted - I'm looking forward to seeing your progress! 

Justin:

 What features do you like and not like?  From working at a pulp mill for several years, I can tell you that the plan you posted has many good features:  a source of logs and wood chips, large piles of chips, a smokestack (modern mills usually have several; some for boiler exhaust and some for pollution control; there are also many steam vents that look like small smoke stacks); you also captured the conveyors, of which there are many.  Keep in mind things like many pipes between buildings (that's where parts of the North Island Refinery can come in).  Also from the north island refinery  might be the upper portion of the "cracking tower," which looks like a chlorine accumulator and several vertical tanks that might be around a mill.  You can use an assortment of dowels or plastic tubes (up to 1" PVC pipe) to make the array of pipes connecting different components and tanks.  The large diameter tubing can be exhaust ducts carrying air rather than liquid.  I especially like your back-in chip dump; that would be a large hydraulic apparatus that could dump rail cars, or could also dump chip semi-trailers.  It would be fun to animate!

Oh, Justin:

One thing I forgot to mention that I didn't see on your plan - WATER!  Pulp and paper making uses HUGE volumes of water; the bleached and screened wood fiber is suspended in tens of thousands of gallons of water to be processed until it is dried into sheets.  In addition, certain processes in many mills use large quantities of steam to help "digest" wood chips into fiber, and also to dry the fiber slurry into solid craft or paper.  That steam requires lots of water.  So, it is very common to find such mills on bays or rivers.  The mill I worked at had a water plant that treated 15 million gallons of river water per day for use in the manufacturing process.

The edge of the body of water could be easily modeled without taking up too much room, and would greatly improve the realism of the mill (and power plant, too) and add variety to the scenery.  Just a thought while you're in the planning stages! 

Justin:

That will be a nice asset for your dad's layout - HO buildings for an N scale paper mill actually won't be out of scale, as long as you correct the size of the doors.  Paper and pulp mill buildings are BIG -  the recovery boiler building at the mill I worked for was 140 feet high - nearly a foot tall in N scale -  and the main stack for it was 300 feet tall - almost 23 inches for an N scale mill.  Modern mills really do tower over the surrounding landscape.  

For the Kiln I plan to use the the one off of the ho Walthers Valley Cement. I think it will fit in nicely based on the pics i found of Kilns i found online. From the same kit i plan to use the smoke stack. It looks like it could be the same stack that walthers used for their Tri-state Power Authority. In the next few years my dad plans to make large power plant based on the Tri-state Power Authority.   It will look nice if i can get him to run Power Lines from the power Plant to My Paper Mill.  The doors to the building are one thing i am looking at right now.

You could also try the paper mill modelers group on yahoo for more imput,......just my .02 worth.

 Tim

The link to the paper mill modelers group is:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PaperMillModelers/

Regarding kilns for limerock, there is an alternative for modelers with space problems.  I worked at a mill that reacted the limerock to make process chemicals, but the rock was brought by truck or barge; there was no kiln at the mill site.  The rock was hand loaded into two 90-foot vertical concrete silos we called "rock towers."  The rock was reacted in the towers to create the acid.  (Guess what job a college student home for summer break was likely to get stuck with??  I didn't want to depress myself by ever trying to calculate how many hundreds of tons of rock I loaded by hand!)  The "rock towers" have a small footprint and could be easily modeled with PVC pike or dowels, depending on your scale.  Using this process, a kiln wouldn't be required at the mill site - though one could be placed elsewhere to generate hopper or gondola loads of limerock for the mill, adding to your railroad's traffic.