Layout Scene Rework (Town/Steel Mill)


lemscate said:
That's what I was thinking about. I do a lot of railfanning down near Gary and Chicago, and always try to find the 'bottle train.' Though now it runs from one of the blast furnaces in Gary...
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I was in Chicago on a business trip in May 1998, and had an opportunity to watch the bottle cars being shifted at the Acme blast furnace. As I ate my lunch in the rental car, I saw the bottle cars being moved back-and-forth, back-and-forth - with no apparent purpose :confused: That was OK by me though, I loved hearing that switcher growl as it pushed/dragged those things around!:D
 
Hey Rex,

I got a real neat steel mill plan for you!:D I guess the only problem is it would be narrow gauge on your layout!:eek: The only problem with modeling a steel mill is they refuse to fit in the alotted area. I have 12' plus in length, the advanatage of N scale and the blankety-blank steel mill doesn't all want to fit.:confused:

Okay, I'll get serious now. Have you considered putting the open hearth, rolling mills, etc. into the space where the blast furnace and coke plant were? I know you wanted to develop that area as the "town", but developing it as the rest of the mill might make more operating sense.

Glenn
 
Hi Glenn! Nice hearing from you.
The way things are looking, I may end up having to use a couple of feet of that area anyway just to accommodate the entrance to the mill. The whole idea of the project was to get another town location set up in this area with the normal in's/out's shipping, but keep the steel mill and its rail traffic. Gads, I think it would take half a garage to set up a full size steel operations in HO scale. :eek: :D .

I agree that it would make a fine complex by using that turf for mill buildings, but then I wouldn't have a place for general rail traffic. I have thought about a combo of town and steel manufacturing as in many places, but the mill buildings are huge and would dwarf everything else. Use as a town, would then give me a total of 4 major city points along with all the in-between stops.

Still thinking about it all and moving this and that around. Carey finished the general drawing for me, but there are some changes that I am making even from that. This was a good time for me to break the ice and dive into XtrkCad: "learn and do" or is it "do and learn";) .

EDIT: Hmmmm! (danged thinking!) I wonder what it would be like to have a town's industrys and small yard, but assume the rest of the town and only have a few towny things that work off into the distance (off layout).
 
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Almost posted on top of each other Josh:D .
Yeah, that is a thought. I remember seeing some towns in Pa that was completely mixed with manufacturing and regular business/homes. Again though the building sizes are huge compared to town kits. It would look like Glenn's N scale houses. Ha! Now that I think some more about it, Birmingham had areas like that.
 
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Question Ken

Take a look at this photo. Is the size of the Northern Power building about right for a blower house used for my BF. I haven't been able to find a picture of one, so I am guessing. How does the piping leave the building? I can see where they connect to the stoves.
 
RexHea said:
Take a look at this photo. Is the size of the Northern Power building about right for a blower house used for my BF. I haven't been able to find a picture of one, so I am guessing. How does the piping leave the building? I can see where they connect to the stoves.
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Rex,

I was originally planning to do exactly what you're doing with a Northern Power builder as the blowerhouse. But I ran out of space because my stoves took up so much extra space. As for the pipe, it can come out thru any wall - depending on whether you want to detail the interior or add many extra elbows (bends). Maybe you could even sheath one of the window panels in "sheet metal" with a hole for the pipe going thru that, so you can avoid defacing the brick wall.

The pipe itself is a whole 'nother story: Walthers omitted a 3rd large pipe (known as the cold blast main) from their BF kit, to keep costs down and assembly simple. On my furnace, the cold-main runs past the front of the stoves, parallel to the outflow pipe that leads to the stack; click the link below and you'll see it, it's the large pipe on the bottom with feeders going into each stove, and a "dead end" opening facing the viewer:

http://ironbelt.net/dialup/slide042.jpg

Here is a top-view diagram showing the relative positions of each opening going into a stove (front surface facing toward the left, rear toward right):

http://trainweb.org/ironbelt/bf2/stove_cross_sect.gif

(The opening for the burner is larger than on the kit, because Walthers' burners are grossly undersized.)

If you don't prefer to do all that extra kitbashing, just have a large pipe coming out of the blower house and disappearing into the area behind the stoves. 95% of people who see yor layout won't know, or care, anyway (I promise I won't tell! ;))
 
Finally, I have come up with a workable plan for the Steel Complex. Sorry for the delay, but the problem was coming off the mainline at the entrance to the peninsula. There are two tracks: one is a mainline, the other is a passing mainline/reversing loop.

I first had to decide on rather to keep the loop or rework the backdrop, bringing in a "wye" from the other side of the wall in a new location which turned out to be problematic. Besides the huge amount of work involved, the wye would have messed up the design of the town and its industries.

The solution (for now:eek: ) is to keep the loop, break the outer mainline at the tunnel and have it feed directly to the mill. The mainline will now connect out of the tunnel to the loop via a curved turnout. The passing part of the loop will serve as the mainline with the steel mill lead as a passing track when needed.

The mill design is not prototypical by no means, but it does fit and I hope that the operation is at least logical even if not correct.:D :D The molten iron is transported directly to the BOF building as part of a continuous casting process. There it is made into steel and the slabs go to the rolling mills of Netherland and Jos can make it into coils and sheets.:D Notice that the Coke Mill coke tracks (far right edge) go to the quencher and then to "over yonder" where it is put into piles and loaded for rail transport and then back to the steel mill yard. (Sounds good to me:D :D )

Anyway, here is my design and I am open for any comments. If you see a potential problem, please SCREAM a warning. Sorry if it's not clear as I am still figuring out XrkCad.

Newton_Steel_Mill_Plans.jpg
 
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RexHea said:
Take a look at this photo. Is the size of the Northern Power building about right for a blower house used for my BF. I haven't been able to find a picture of one, so I am guessing. How does the piping leave the building? I can see where they connect to the stoves.
Click to expand...

I don't know either but I love that steel mill.

NYC_George
 
Rexs' steelmill and co

RexI don't have any idea how you could do something wrong in this plan because i don't know anything about a "Steel Complex"
it is great you've got the courage to do that! and the( minimum) space for it
There it is made into steel and the slabs go to the rolling mills of Netherland and Jos can make it into coils and sheets.
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Please Rex slow down a bit: My backyard is overloaded with slabs you sent so for the coming month please no futher slabs:D ( neighbours are complaining...hehehe lol:D :D
BTW I didn't know that it is shipped to Holland to the "Hoogovens" from Ijmuiden( place/town at our coast at the North Sea. Add a picture...
Rex, this also is a very interesting thread. We can learn the proces of making steel in a nutsshell this way!

Jos
 
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Hey Jos - Great ore dock photo! Is that really somewhere in Nederland?

Rex, looks good to me! Even though you can't operate the hot metal cars, you can still have them parked in conspicuous places. The slag pots can be run to a remote dumping pit over the main line (don't forget to add a caboose); and there are places to spot the ore jennies, coal hoppers, scrap metal gons, even a boxcar or two. That track in the top left corner - unless you've already planned some other use - can be for covered coil cars (steel mills park them anywhere and everywhere, I kid you not!). I made two diagrams (one for each end of the peninsula) to illustrate the car-spotting opportunities.

Newton_West_End.gif


Newton_East_End.gif


Looking forward to photos of the end product!
 
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OOPS! I meant open hearth furnace. Guess my mind was still on the steel.org site and that popped to my mind.

Someone please tell me how to get a descent copy of the XtrkCad drawing posted on this. Ken, your post is so crisp where mine is plain ole yuk.

Thank you Ken for the operation ideas. Yeah, I knew that the bottle cars wouldn't be moved and I had to sacrifice any movement of coke direct from the plant. For now and other than ore, coal, coke, and slag, the focus will be on shipping and receiving more so than within the mill complex. The top left and single track was actually going to cross the main with that 90deg crossing I have been trying to use for ever:D . However, the design with the curved turnout nixed that idea and now it can be used for anything handy, including a switch engine pocket.
 
RexHea said:
...Someone please tell me how to get a descent copy of the XtrkCad drawing posted on this. Ken, your post is so crisp where mine is plain ole yuk.
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Rex, when I make images from xtracad drawings, I do a "screen scrape" (press the Prt Scrn key near the upper-right corner of the keyboard); that saves a bitmap image of the entire screen to the clipboard. Then start a session of MS-Paint or some other image-editing tool, and press Ctrl-V to paste the image into the editor. Crop-out all the 'junk' and save the image as a GIF file, and wah-lah --- there's your diagram!
 
Thanks Ken, I will give it a go. I have been doing a bitmap thing in Xcad and then to jpeg in Paint Shop Pro. Every step makes it worse...I hate bitmaps. I thought about a Tiff, but will try a GIF. Yours looks great.
 
OK, I reposted the plan above. I still had to use .jpeg because of using this forums gallery. I haven't converted over to the new Railimages, yet. Even so, it came out a lot better. One improvement I made was not allowing much compression. Ken, you have just shown me the best use I have ever found for the screen capture, in 20 years of fooling with these electronic boxes. Ha!

BTW: On my layout BOF stands for "Before Oxygen Furnace". Hahahahaha!
 
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CSX_road_slug said:
Rex, when I make images from xtracad drawings, I do a "screen scrape" (press the Prt Scrn key near the upper-right corner of the keyboard); that saves a bitmap image of the entire screen to the clipboard. Then start a session of MS-Paint or some other image-editing tool, and press Ctrl-V to paste the image into the editor. Crop-out all the 'junk' and save the image as a GIF file, and wah-lah --- there's your diagram!
Click to expand...

Thanks Ken I was trying to do that myself the other day!!


Rex that's lookn real nice, should be fun to operate.

Ken.
 
short, small intermezzo..

CSX road slug:
Hey Jos - Great ore dock photo! Is that really somewhere in Nederland?
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OHWYES!! We do have them( steelmill) in our country...but as usualy: 10 times smaller then yours.
They are situated in the north of our country at the North sea coast about 25 miles from Amsterdam. I think they are in hands of :"Corus"
Add some pictures + website( english) of the history of "Hoogovens Ijmuiden": http://www.sieho.nl/sieho_uk.htm
So now back to Rexs' thread!!

Jos
 
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