well everybody the time is soon aproaching for a mating of all parts on my layout. I need last minute improvements for the steel mill area. so how do they operate them and what car to and from each building including order? I have the walthers steel mill with a electric furnace i no i needed a rolling mill but space was a consideration and a power generator driven by the spent gasses to generate electricity. i have ore and coal coming in plus limestone from a quarry and where does ore come from also.
I am using the Walthers steel mill on my layout. It has a few modifications, but the sequence of moving rail cars is the same.
The coke oven receives coal and ships coke to the blast furnace.
The highline of the blast furnace receives coke, ore, and stone. The blast furnace sends hot metal in bottle cars to the electric furnace. The blast furnace also has outbound slag and ash. ( all inbound ore is in ore cars in my case.)
The electric furnace receives hot metal from the blast furnace. It also receives scrap steel on gondolas. It ships slabs of steel to the rolling mill.
The rolling mill receives the slabs of steel. It ships out structural steel in gondolas. I could also have had coils of sheet metal shipped, but I do not do that.
GARRY
HEARTLAND DIVISION, CB&Q RR
EVERYWHERE LOST; WE HUSTLE OUR CABOOSE FOR YOU
Walthers has apparently made both an electric arc furnace and a blast furnace kit.
The electric arc furnace uses scrap metal to make steel. Usually.
The blast furnace makes it from scratch using iron ore and etc.
Here's an article about electric arc furnaces:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_arc_furnace
There used to be an electric arc furnace operation in Emeryville, CA. It was right by the tracks and you could walk up to the fence and watch it work. It was quite a sight. When I first saw it, they poured into ingot molds. Years later they did a continuous pour and cut it into slabs while it was coming out. There was a building next door where they turned the slabs into rebar. You could watch red hot rebar shooting out and being stacked to cool.
While I was watching it once, a guy came up to the fence and offered me a job! I declined.
It was replaced by an Ikea. A real step downwards.
Anyway, if you've got only the electric arc model, it's scrap steel in--usually in gondolas. Output could be rebar on flats or gons. Or it could be slabs or barstock. I suppose you could also produce sheet steel and then use coil cars to ship.
The operation also uses bags of additives--I saw the guys toss them in. While they likely came in on trucks, yours could come in in boxcars. I'm going to pretty much guess and say they used a dozen bags per pour. And that a melt and pour took about an hour, maybe two. Of course, sometimes I'd stop buy and the shop would be cold and empty.
The operation clearly used a LOT of electricity. When it started up after a charge, it was like lightning and thunder in a (very big) bottle. Oddly, I do not recall electric lines prominently place--but it did get there somehow.
You can do an image search for "electric arc furnace" and see/learn a lot.
Oh, yeah. This would be a REAL opportunity for special effects, both light and sound.
Ed
7j43k...The blast furnace makes it from scratch using iron ore and etc....
Actually, a blast furnace makes iron, which then requires another process to turn it into steel. This could be an open hearth furnace, a BOF (Basic Oxygen Furnace), or an electric arc furnace.Generally speaking, the open hearth furnace would be for an older operation, while either of the other two would be more common from the last 50 years up to present day. Older operations, even those using the latter two methods of steelmaking, would likely pour the steel in moulds to make ingots. Ingots came in various shapes and sizes, depending on their end-use, and were usually rolled into slabs, blooms, or billets, which themselves usually required further processing. Slabs generally were rolled into either strip (which was then rolled into flat, thin sheet which became coil steel - used for cars, appliances, etc.), or into plate, a thicker sheet which would be further processed (continuously-welded pipe, armour plate, ship's hulls, etc.). There were, of course, lots of other steel products made from ingot steel.A modern steelmaking mill with a large-enough electric furnace or BOFwould most likely cast the steel directly into slabs or billets for further processing. This eliminates several of the steps required with ingots, and is a continuous process, as Ed has mentioned.The additives are used to alter the metallurgy so that the finished product will be suitable for its intended use. The plant at which I worked offered probably 300 different grades of steel, often customising them for specific users - for example, the specifications for wheel rim and wheel spyder were different for each of the Big Three automakers, and each had several different ones depending on the end use - car, truck, whatever. Besides the raw materials for steel and iron making and the outbound finished products, a steel plant can generate a lot of other traffic: furnace refractories, electrodes for arc furnaces, machinery and associated parts, etc., etc.
Wayne
i found a picture of a large generator run by steel mills excess? the picture looked like a giant armature outside that i enclosed. does this generator for the electricity run by blast furnace gasses or coke gasses.
How about some pictures?
7j43k:
Hey, I bought a lot of stuff from that Ikea.
I rememder the electric arc furnace operation in Emeryville, CA. very well. Drove past it many times. Way cool looking.
Ken G Price My N-Scale Layout
Digitrax Super Empire Builder Radio System. South Valley Texas Railroad. SVTRR
N-Scale out west. 1996-1998 or so! UP, SP, Missouri Pacific, C&NW.
jfbI have a sintering plant also for electrical power for the layout. I need some info on it . I found a 1969 picture and my era also and re produced it.