Steel Mill Modelers - let's hear from ya

[DigitalGriffin]

I'm not 100% sure what you are asking for by your description.  But here's a summary of what goes in and comes out of various buildings and by what cars.

Once pig iron gets turned into steel as a converter (BOF/Electric/Open Hearth), it's poured as a liquid into caskets.  This process is known as teaming and is typically done with a large laddle type bucket. 

These cask are put on individual buggies because these suckers are HEAVY.

These are rolled to a rolling mill where a stripper crane strips off the cask, leaving a glowing hot red ingot of metal. These are picked up and put into a "warming bath" until they are ready for use on the rolling mill line.

Once the rollers, and breakers shape said the hot steel, it's in a simi finished/finished state ready to be used by customers/clients.  These products are put on regular drop side gons via cranes or tractors and shipped to their destiation.  Common forms for small mills are rolled sheet metal (used in canning factories), I-Beam for construction, Pipe and extruded wire for whatever else. 

From what I can tell straight "slabs" as a finished product are uncommon because they aren't structurally beneficial, and therefore require reheating and reshaping to be useful. 

Each type of product output had it's own rolling mill.  Coils of steel obviously go into steel coil cars.  wires and pipes I've seen go into box cars, or gons.  And I see I-Beams on ordinary drop side gons.  Putting supports under the heaviest i-beams helped distribute the load of weight across the width of the gon.

Scrap from rolling mill went into gons also to be recycled in a junk pile.  (Which in turn would go to something like an Open Hearth or Electric Furnace for recycling)

Rough forms (T channel, L channel, small I/H beams)  can also go to an advanced foundry building to make things like steel span trusses.  I'm not sure how these were typically transported however.

 

[NittanyLion]

These are the cars I see regularly.  Theres not a lot of pictures of them on the internet for some reason, so I'm guessing they're rather rare.

 

[tinman1]

Spearo, from your pictures I can see I'm going to have to refigure my options. If you are in N-scale without any hulett unloaders, then there is no way I'm going to be able to achieve what I'm wanting in HO. I appreciate the pictures, it has given me a little dose of reality with the overall sizes.

[spearo]

Tinman - I bet you could accomplish what you are looking for in a 5' wide table but just not have any room available at the "front" of the blast furnace.  I wanted a yard and support buildings between the edge of the table and the front of the BF so there is about 20" there too.  If you slid your BF to the edge of the table, or almost, you would have a heck of a lot of room at the back side.  Probably putting your oar yard in the middle of the table which would be perfect b/c there will be no trains running through there(very hard to reach).  I don't know how much space those hueletts are going to take up.  My bridge crane is kit-bashed from two kits so it is a bit longer than a single kit.  I had the advantage of knowing how big my table was going to be(max size I could get out of the basement in case we move) before I built my trackplan so it was a little easier to plan.  I still spent several weeks moving around cardboard footprints of all my buildings on the table until I got it right, hopefully.

Good luck

[Mike in Kingsville]

I have modeled a portion of a steel mill in HO in a space 16"x14.5'. On that layout I have a double sized Walther's EAF, a scratchbuilt furnace, cast house, rolling mill, and other buildings. Some of them are shallow relief- like the rolling mill- its 4" deep and 4' long. Most of my mill buildings are built from scratch.

Pictures are at http://rail.habersack.com .  After a few false starts, I began the layout in earnest in September 2008- a lot of the buildings have been built for a while; for example my blast furnace has been together for more than 15 years and is entirely scratchbuilt. I'm not a rivet counter- I am going for the overall impression. I agree- there needs to be more steel discussion here and I am not not certain that the MR staff would read the other forums elsewhere.

Mike

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