The Mill

The Mill looks great. Thanks Tom for share the pictures of John's mill. There is some good ideals in his mill. Is the bridge crossing from Newport to Cincinnati scratch built??

bridge answer and some general info

Donald, the bridge is an Atlas O scale kit.  I added the safety striping after someone (yours truly) backed into it and knocked the bridge along with a 20 car L&N transfer onto the floor.  The stripes are attached to poplar 1X6's for stability.  The purpose of the mill is to feed traffic to my railroad.  Currently we have not run much internal mill traffic other than coke and scrap cars as captive service movements.  The bottle cars and ingot buggies are scenery right now.  The actual Newport Steel complex was never nearly this large.  I don't believe they even had blast furnaces?  But here, we make pipe (green bldg), coils- long mill structure next to one with crane, and cast slabs-another big grey bldg.  The Koppers coke plant ships by products in tank cars also. We ship in scrap steel, additional coke,  coking coal, alloys, and hope to run a weekly  ore train  soon.  I admit, some of my structures are not correct, but I have learned a lot about iron and steel making and continue to learn.  To do it right, I would need to dedicate much more real estate to the mill complex.  But for now,  it does accomplish the primary objective  and there is much more to the railroad than this industry.

Thanks

John, thanks for the information on the Bridge and the steel mill it self. I been modeling steel for going on 12 years now and learn stuff just about it everyday. I have a 16' x 16' steel mill layout that is only half done.

more info

I'm so in awe of seeing my stuff on the blog that I am going to post one more info  item.  Right now , there is a North switcher who works the scrap yard and coke plant.  A South switcher works the high line, the pipe and slab mills and the coil tracks.  He also runs cars over to the "B" yard which is a staging track representing the rolling mill complex which is a photo backdrop.  Thirdly we run a twelve car transfer over the Ohio river bridge to the K&LE at least once a shift.  Currently we are running one shift per operating session since there is a lot of switching and yard work on most of my layout.  The mill is worked by the Licking River Terminal RR.  There was (is?) a prototype  LRT which did not switch the mill but did switch a coal loading dock on the L&N at the Licking River.

More post!!

John, Post all you want about your layout. I like to see more of it.

Impressive!

Thanks for posting Tom and please do post more John. That mill is impressive in it's size and detail. I'm assuming during operations there are several folks operating in and around the mill?

Great work

Tom and John great work on the posts and model. I have been buying kits for the steel mill I will someday build on my layout. I had planned on doing this once before and the kits went out of stock. So even though I am not ready to use them I have them. 2 blast furnaces, coke retort and coke works, Rolling Mill, Blower house, several over head cranes and piping kits, and from looking at other modelers a very good idea on how to build a background model of a open hearth complex out of gator board.

I sure would enjoy more pictures and maybe a video of your layout in operation.

Rob

operations of mill

Kevin, thanks for the nice words.  I built the mill with the idea of at least two operators.  Last session, one guy- Stu Thayer was able to handle all of the jobs.  He is an experienced operator, though a first timer on this job.    The aisle is fairly crowded with the doings on the other side of the aisle, so this helped keep the body count down.  Since we are not currently moving hot metal cars and ingot buggies, it probably can continue as either one or two person assignment.  Rob, the postings at least with photos will be dependent on Tom Patterson's enthusiasm at least for now.  The good news is that Tom is very enthused.  John