If you're planning on doing a complete integrated steel works, the first thing you'll need is lots of space.
The steel plant where I worked was the largest in Canada and covered hundreds of acres, but it was fairly small by world standards. Based on what I recall when I started in the mid-sixties, the major raw materials came in by lake boat: coal, iron ore or pellets, and limestone. Some plants bring in raw materials by rail or in combination with rail and water. Some plants bring in coke from another site, too, so coal is not required. If you want to bring in coal, you'll need to have a coke oven battery, to convert the coal to coke. If you have coke ovens, then you should also have a by-products plant, which recovers useable by-products from the coke-making process. To make iron, you'll need a blast furnace: the Walthers model is a fairly small example, by the way. When you've made the iron, you'll need slag pots, or thimble cars, to take the slag to the slag dump, where it's processed for sale to other companies that use it to make building materials. To transport the molten iron, you'll require torpedo, or bottle cars, which will take the iron to either an open hearth, or, at our plant in the late '60's, a basic oxygen furnace, or BOF. We ran both, 5 or 6 small open hearth furnaces (under 80 tons capacity each) five large open hearth furnaces (300 to 500 tons each), and three BOF vessels, at that time about 120 tons each. All of these furnaces were in large metal buildings, so they'd be good candidates as background structures on a model. There was also a lot of pollution control equipment around these structures, like precipitators, dust collectors, baghouses, etc. Don't forget to include the stoves, used to heat the "blast" gas for the furnaces.
Once the iron was turned into steel in either the BOF or blast furnace, it was poured into moulds that stood on either four- or eight-wheeled ingot buggies. Ingots varied in weight from about 5 tons, all the way up to about 26 tons. The mould generally weighed about the same as the ingot inside it. After a suitable cooling time (usually 2 to 4 hours), the buggies were taken to the stripper building, where a large overhead crane "stripped" the moulds from the ingots. These cranes were also in buildings, but the ends and lower wall areas were open.
The stripped ingots, hopefully still red hot, were next taken to a primary rolling mill. This is the area in which I worked. The building was mostly closed in, and was over 1/4 mile long, as were most of the finishing mills farther downstream. The ingots were placed, by overhead cranes, in soaking pits (basically large chambers lined with refractory brick and a removable lid), where they were reheated to a suitable rolling temperature, usually around 2300 degrees Fahrenheit. After "soaking" at the proper temperature for a specified amount of time, the ingots were removed from the pit and rolled into slabs, which would be cut to size on an hydraulic shear, then stacked and shipped out to the strip mill.
At the strip mill, the slabs were charged, by crane, into a reheat furnace, where they were once again brought up to rolling temperature, then, in successive stages, rolled into coils.
Coils
could be shipped out after this step (the coils were allowed to cool first, as they were usually shipped in gondolas with wooden floors), but many went to another mill where they were tin plated or galvanized. At that time, these coils were usually smaller, and were shipped in boxcars.
Our plant also made rod and bar products, a whole other facet of steel making, requiring more large buildings for all the individual processes. Because the plant was built over a period of about 60 or 70 years, there was some disorder in the arrangement of buildings that, ideally, would have been situated in a more logical layout. Supporting all of this was a vast track system, and a fleet of over two dozen locos. I have a very large aerial photo of the plant, and it's easy to see why it was so easy to get lost in amongst the different mills.
Your best bet to model this would be to study the various procedures and the equipment associated with them, then pick the parts that most interest you to model, and do the rest as flats or backdrop.
By the way, a decent-size blast furnace, with its ancillary structures (stockhouse, stoves, and gas scrubbers, etc.), in HO scale, will take up about 1/4 of the space that you have for your layout, so selective compression is a
must, as is concentrating on only the area that interests you most.
If you're unable to get a copy of Dean Freytag's book, see if your local library can get you a copy of The Making, Shaping and Treating of Steel, put out by United States Steel. My copy, printed in 1964, is the eighth edition. They may have the book in their reference section, where you can view, but not borrow, it. This is a large book, over 1300 pages, and while I found the section on metallurgical theory very boring, there are good explanations of most processes of that time, and quite a few good black and white pictures.
Wayne
