Taconite Plant
To All: A recently scratch built project is a Taconite Plant for Dave Capron's Great Lakes Northern layout in Suttons Bay, Michigan, built gratis. The plant is made from cardstock covered with stucco, painted concrete color, and weathered. Note the many stacks on the roofs. The operation of this plant is as follows: Empties arrive from Cincy.OH at the Taconite Plan. Full loads out of the plant to West Yard in Marquette. Loads exchanged for empties on the ore dock, back to the yard & then on to the plant. All this involves a total of 120 ore cars in the movements, for one or two operators, during a nights operating session.
Dave has to add ballast, ground cover, etc. to the scene. Yours, Elvin Howland/E. St.Louis Rail Group Layout
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Is the plant...
...freelanced or prototype? What other features are required: water source (lake?), truck traffic, etc? The detailing looks great!
Taconite
fmcpos: The plant is freelanced. Like coal mines, taconite plants come in many designs. No
two are alike. Taconite is low grade iron ore that is made into small pellets, that do not
freeze in the winter as raw iron ore will. Raw ore is brought to the plant either by truck or rail.
Large water sources are not required, though water is used in the plant. Some Taconite
is recovered from old mines that no longer provides high grade iron ore, but has low
grade iron ore that can be recovered. For a more through discussion of taconite see
wikipedia
Yours, Elvin Howland/E. St.Louis Rail Group Layout
Taconite Trains Kept Tenn Pass open for ten years
Taconite is vary heavy the D&RGW trains used hoppers cars and could not be filled more than half way. Their is a plant in Utah that used it. Took 2 ac6000 on front 2 in middle and. 1 in rear to get them over pass. The biggest reason UP closed the line. SP bought 100 engines new mainly to take care of this business.
Art Houston
Grande Pacific RR
ahouston3@charter.net
More operations
Taconite plants also receive limestone, usually in side dump cars. This can be brought from the docks to the plant. Also gondolas full of bars and huge steel balls that go into the rollers that crush the taconite. Taconite is also made in varying grades and content of ore and limestone for certain customers.
I did not understand the part about empty cars coming from Ohio? If there is a dock involved, with shipping pellets over the great lakes in freighters, why have ore cars go to Ohio?
Ore operations can add a lot to a layout, as my whole layout is ore hauling. It is not just unit trains on an endless circuit.
Thank you for posting this structure. Looks impressive and should be lots of fun.
Thomas G.
Modeling northern Minnesota iron ore line in HO.
Looks Great
The plant looks great how about posting more pictures of it??
Donald Dunn
http://www.trainweb.org/kvo/
http://www.trainweb.org/ddminingsteel/