Hamilton & Great Lakes Railroad

[doctorwayne]

.... Whomever invented the term " selective compression " must have been modeling the steel industry ......

You're certainly right about that. I started scratchbuilding a blast furnace in the early '70s, and was fortunate to have blueprints from which to work, but the cast house alone covered almost 16sq. ft. Stoves would have been another 1'x3', the stockhouse probably 8"-10"x5', gas scrubbers, precipitators, baghouses and all the ancillary details another 3'x3'. The furnace itself was almost 2' tall, and that was without the bell housing, uptakes, or the downcomer. The two track skip bridge was about 3' long. I eventually ran out of space (one bedroom apartment) and money.
Here's a view of the prototype, with a torpedo car sticking out of one of the bays. Behind the wall with the railings on top is the slag pit. The cast house was laid out like a shallow "V", with two or three teeming tracks on each leg of the "V", and the furnace in the centre.




...and my version of it. The foundation for the furnace shell and the wall at the slag pit were cast in dental plaster. The furnace shell is made from sheet styrene, while all of the structural steelwork is milled basswood, as it the corrugated siding. The brickwork is sheets from Holgate and Reynolds, cemented to 1/4" balsa sheets.



The base of the skip bridge and at right, if I recall correctly, the electrical substation:



Over the years, I dismantled most of it, trashing some and giving some away. I still have those roof trusses seen in the second photo, and the one cast house crane which got partially built (there were supposed to be two cast house cranes). I re-worked it somewhat to resemble a couple of the outdoor cranes at the mill in which I worked. It languished in a shoe box for many years, but now serves the locomotive shop at Lowbanks:





The mill in which I worked would be over 25' long in HO scale.


Wayne