Compact Steel Mill plan?

[nolatron]

So forget what I said before, I'm going to go ahead and give it a shot.

Last night I took some poster board and cut of pieces based on the sizes in the Walther's catalog of the Blast Furnace, Coke Oven, Electric Furnace, and Rolling Mill and arranged them up on the layout to see how they will all fit.

I could make them all fit in the space, but they'd be almost be right next to each other in line. I think it would just like kinda funny. It also wouldn't leave a whole lotta room for trackage.

So I have a few options....

1) I could simply use the Rolling Mill kit and "selectively compress" into being both the Furnace and Rolling Mill. There's 3 internal tracks, so 2 would be tracks to the blast furnace, and then the 3rd would be the coil car load/unload car. This reduces the industry's footprint.

2) Simply leave the mill/furnace off the layout, and operate the mill has a remote merchant furnace, delivering molten pig iron to a remote plant for further processing. This would greatly reduce industry footprint, and I think the fewer GIGANTIC mill buildings might look better on the layout.

3) Expand the footprint and get rid of the industry (which would now be GERN since I swapped GERN and the Refinery so the refinery would be a little larger) that was going to be around the corner near the end of the layout. This one may depend on much I like the Steel industry because this would make the Steel Mill rather large, almost like the "showpiece" of the layout.

4) The last option would be to swap the location of the town with the proposed mill area, with the town wrapping around the corner towards the end of the layout. This would allow me to to have the mill on the inside of the track against the backdrop, giving me the ability to make some buildings like the furnace and/or mill be half deep backdrop buildings. I would have take some measurements here to see if there's any gain/loss of real estate though. I would also have to add a turnout on the mainline someplace to get into the mill.

I'm leaning toward option 1 or 2 right now.