Compact Steel Mill plan?

[nolatron]

Shaun, and anyone else contemplating modelling a steel plant, you have to realise that almost all integrated steel plants are enormous, and even most club layouts don't have the room to model more than a very compressed representation of the real thing. The Walthers blast furnace is a model of a very small furnace, as are the coke ovens, rolling mills, whatever. If you want to model the steel industry, select the part that interests you most, and concentrate your efforts there. Most mills are pretty plain looking buildings, and, for the most part, are good candidates for background "flats" or even as pictures on a backdrop - the real ones can be up to or more than a half mile long. The operations inside are linear in nature, so you could easily generate rail traffic by modelling one end of a mill, either to accept, ingots, slabs, billets, etc., or model the shipping end, where the slabs, coils, or plates leave the building. (Incidently, slabs and plates are not usually the same thing - a slab is either rolled from an ingot, or, more commonly nowadays, cast in a continuous caster. Plates are rolled from slabs and are usually of a thickness close to what the finished thickness will be. In general, the metallurgy for plates is quite different from that for coils and other strip products, too.)
Most would agree that the blast furnace is, visually, the most interesting. Unless you're modelling a very early 20th century steel works, most of the other processing operations are done inside large buildings - interesting in many cases, but usually visible only through a doorway.
The coke ovens, while not in a building, are most interesting when in operation, but it's pretty difficult to model an operating charging car, a door remover, or a pusher. I'd relegate the coke ovens to the background, too.
The flow chart that Josh posted, while more suited to mid-20th century practices, will give you a good idea of the steps involved.
I'm not trying to discourage would-be steel industry modellers, but your efforts will look more believeable if you don't try to model the entire operation.

Wayne

Thanks for info Wayne. I agree 100% not trying to model the whole thing. I would never have the space to do so.

Like you said, many of the larger buildings are rather plain looking, and for such large real estate (and cost!) needed for them thought of simply leaving them out. If I swap the area I'm planning with now with the town area, I could probably use a photo backdrop of a steel mill to represent the Electric Furnace, etc.. and to give the impression of a larger industry. Operations would mainly be dropping off raw material to the coke ovens, and maybe a "finish product" track for coil cars (since you can't tell if they're empty or full!). I'll have to measure the areas tonight and see if that could work.

Currently I have the Coke Oven kit and Blast Furnace kit in my possession. So modeling the receiving end would be the easiest way to go (like Option #2). I liked the look of these two buildings and thought they would be an interesting addition to the layout since most of my other buildings that are just, well, buildings.