So in my never ending shuffle of railroad plans, I thought of possibly adding in a steel mill to my layout.

Quickie backstory: I bought a Blast Furnace and Coke Oven kit with the idea to somehow add them into the GERN industry area, give it a more industrial look. Then I started thinking why not just add a steel mill to the layout and use these kits for their intended purpose?

So here I am now, goggling around looking for track plans for steel mills, pictures, etc... But unlike most of these sites I find online, they have one thing I don't really have....Vasts amounts space. It seems most people dedicate a LOT of space to their mills. The area I would be putting the mill is about 6.5' long and about 12" deep. So it would have to be small, compact mill in a shotgun (straight line) configuration, with track entering into the area at the right of this area.

So I'm trying to figure out what would the best layout be for the plant? I'm thinking the Mill would contain three buildings: The Coke Oven, Blast Furnace, and a rolling mill. What's you're typical order of operation here? Maybe I don't need all 3 buildings?

I'm still reading up on Mills and what not, but thought I'd ask here to see what some folks who've possibly already modeled a mill would suggest to guide a "mill newbie" along.

Thanks yall.

A rough draft:

First excellent idea! You're more of a modeler then I am..

I won't touch a steel mill because of the require space for the buildings,inbound track for coal,ore,scrap steel,inbound loads,inbound/outbound empties etc.

Best of luck my friend..

Brakie Wrote:First excellent idea! You're more of a modeler then I am..

I won't touch a steel mill because of the require space for the buildings,inbound track for coal,ore,scrap steel,inbound loads,inbound/outbound empties etc.

Best of luck my friend..

Yeah, I started to think the space needed to model the mill would be more than I'd ever have, but I think I can get away with selectively compressing the industry and modeling just like the inner workings basically. All of the in/out loads tracks, docks, etc.. would simply be located "off layout", and operations would be minimal.

It may not exactly be prototypical, but simple operations could be:
- moving loaded/unloaded coal cars to the coke ovens from the mainline
- Internal switching of cars to/from blast furnace to mill
- moving loaded/unload coil cars from the mill to mainline

I know, it's a crazy idea!

I just wonder if these buildings will just "overpower" the layout because of their size. The top 2" of the blast furnace will be hidden by fascia because it's so tall! Guess there's only one way to find out!

Shaun i like the plan

It represents the basics of the Steel Process. Coal comes from Coal Mine in the coal drag, goes to Coke Oven and turned into Coke.
Coke goes into Quencher Tower and is cooled. Coke is brought to the Blast Furnace and is mixed with Iron Ore and Limestone to produce Molten Iron.
From here, the Molten Iron would be transported via Hot Metal Bottle Cars (which i might add ARE available in N scale ) and would be taken to a Open Hearth Furnace, Electric Arc Furnace, and BOF (Basic Oxygen Furnace) or a combination of the 3 if i understand correctly.

The OHF combines Molden Iron with Lime and Flux to make Molten Steel.
The EAF combines Molten Iron, Crushed Iron Ore, Lime, Flux and Scrap to make Molten Steel.
And the BOF combines Molten Iron and Oxygen to make Molten Steel.
From those MASSIVE buildings, it would be off to the Rolling Mill where it would be pounded and rolled in steel coils and steel slabs, shipped out to Machine Shops and Manufacture's that have ordered coils and slabs......

I know what you mean about the shear size of the buildings, i did all 3 of those buildings in N scale about a year ago or so, maybe it was 2 years ago lol cant member, and i was shocked just how massive they were, i mean the BF was just as tall, if not taller then all my HO scale Buildings. I cant even image what these HO ones are going to be like!!

The Kits that you have are all nice kits and pretty easy to build. My only advise on that Blast Furnace is to build it slow, make sure to follow instructions, and paint whenever and wherever you can, trust me, when that thing is done, you wont want to be painting it lol, there are way to many details that could potentially get broken when painting....

Good luck with your project :mrgreen:

nolatron Wrote:

Brakie Wrote:First excellent idea! You're more of a modeler then I am..

I won't touch a steel mill because of the require space for the buildings,inbound track for coal,ore,scrap steel,inbound loads,inbound/outbound empties etc.

Best of luck my friend..

Yeah, I started to think the space needed to model the mill would be more than I'd ever have, but I think I can get away with selectively compressing the industry and modeling just like the inner workings basically. All of the in/out loads tracks, docks, etc.. would simply be located "off layout", and operations would be minimal.

It may not exactly be prototypical, but simple operations could be:
- moving loaded/unloaded coal cars to the coke ovens from the mainline
- Internal switching of cars to/from blast furnace to mill
- moving loaded/unload coil cars from the mill to mainline

I know, it's a crazy idea!

I just wonder if these buildings will just "overpower" the layout because of their size. The top 2" of the blast furnace will be hidden by fascia because it's so tall! Guess there's only one way to find out!

Its not a crazy idea and it has merits as well..

You could run a hot slab train as well going to another mill-like the Union RR does as well as other railroads.

We are adding a mill complex at the Bucyrus HO club..It will dominate the layout because of its sear size.

EDIT: Nevermind, see below...

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.

Well...Are those the foot prints of the mill complex?

Again like I mention you can run a hot slab train if need be.

Brakie Wrote:Well...Are those the foot prints of the mill complex?

Yeah. The length/width is represented by each poster board cut out.

Brakie Wrote:Again like I mention you can run a hot slab train if need be.

By hot slab's, you mean steel slab plates on flat cars? Those would come out of the Electric Furnace destined for a rolling mill "offsite" right?

Shaun, welcome to Steel Modeling, you NEVER have enough room for the buildings you want to use and model lol

nolatron Wrote:By hot slab's, you mean steel slab plates on flat cars? Those would come out of the Electric Furnace destined for a rolling mill "offsite" right?

That is correct. From the blast furnace would come the molten iron in hot metal bottle cars and slag in slag cars. Bottle cars would be destined for the Basic Oxygen Furnace, Open Hearth Furnace or in your case, the Electric Arc Furnace. From the EAF, steel comes out as ingots and goes to through the ingot stripper, then to the soaking pits, and then off to the Rolling Mill to be turned into Blooms, Billets, and Slabs. Check out this diagram that has helped me out in understanding the steel process:




Also, if you can, weather by moving the mainline or moving the steel mill to a location that the mainline is in front of the buildings and the Steel Buildings are along the wall, you could angle some of them AND model some of them as narrow backround Buildings. The Rolling Mill and/or the Electric Arc Furnace would be a good and easy candidate to cut in half length wise and model as a backround building. The Blast Furnace, i wouldnt cut that in half, that would be very hard lol, i built that one and i dont know if that is possible to model just half the furnace lol. You could angle the furnace along the wall though to make it easier to get tracks to it if need be...

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

doctorwayne Wrote: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.

Looks like swapping mill and town won't really work. Less real estate there because of how the track is running through, and I don't wanna really tear up all the track.

So, I can still do a photo backdrop in the currently planned area to act represent the Furnace/Mill area, and simply model the inbound/outbound tracks for finished material coil cars, along with tracks to the coke oven for raw material. I think this might do well.

Tomorrow is off-Friday so I'll be starting work on the Blast Furnace first thing in the morning.

Just tinkering a little. If I move the mainline to run in the front of the shelf to be able to use backdrop buildings, I'd get about 8'x12" of space. It seems to fit ok on the computer it this setup I did. Just a starting point for an idea.

The electric furnace (lower backdrop building) and rolling mill would be shallow backup buildings. I could probably simply use like the rolling mill kit, cut in half and use each half to represent each building now that I think of it.

Added in some storage tracks at the top for coil cars and flat load slab cars. Most of the industry will be for show, like having the slag track simply run off into the backdrop, or to behind the blast furnace. And one BF track running by itself to the electric furnace.

Honestly, I probably won't ever "operate" the mill, so a design mostly for show that "looks" like it could be operated is fine.