Bethlehem Steel Mill part 2 - first draft track plan & ops overview

Here's my first shot at designing the (1973 Bethlehem West Seattle) steel mill model and its operations. There will be many more drafts before we lock it down. The space I'm working with is roughly 3x8 feet with room for extending the mill yard to the left as much as needed. The large squares on the background paper are one foot square, so the small squares are 1/5 of a foot.

In 1973 there was not a continuous billet caster, so the liquid steel was moved by railcar from the furnace to the stripper building nearby, unlike today. This also may mean that the mill could make a larger variety of products than it does today, we'll have to find this out.

The basic operations are:
1. transfer trains from the Beth mill yard to the BN West Seattle yard and back
2. classifying those trains in the mill yard, both outbound and inbound
3. moving loaded hot ingot molds from the EAF to the stripper building, and returning empties
4. moving finished product (rebar, angles, etc) from the rolling mill to the shipping building (in gons)
5. moving finished product from the shipping building to the mill yard for transfer to BN
6. moving baghouse dust from the EAF to the mill yard for transfer to BN
7. moving limestone or dolomite up the ramp to the EAF holding tanks (in cov. hop.)
8. moving other additives to the additives yard (need to find out whether coke would have been shipped in by hopper cars in 1973, rather than bags as it is today)
9. moving scrap metals in from the mill yard to the scrap yard
10. moving empty cars in reverse of all of the above moves
11. moving the mill loco(s) in and out of the "roundhouse" building for maintenance
12. spotting empty gons on a storage track near the rolling mill to be staged for quick loading at the shipping building.
13. moving new electrodes in, and spent electrodes out, of the additives yard

This is all the moves I can think of so far, but let me know if you have ideas on this. For example,  there were probably various other supplies and machinery moves that aren't listed yet, to the various buildings in various types of cars. Also, where were the electrodes, dolomite, coke, scrap, and finished product shipped to and from?

Bethlehem Steel Mill West Seattle part 1 - east ladder overview

Well, you might as well get used to the idea that I'm going to add a model of this awesome steel mill to the West Seattle extension of my layout. It's going to take a while to figure out how to do it, though. We went on a tour of the plant last week, but they don't allow pictures, so the best I can do for the moment is share this overview image from Google Earth, we can get into details later. The Electric Arc Furnace (EAF) is in the upper right and the "Shipping Department" is in the upper left. One of the tracks in the middle has a steep incline and leads to a dolomite unloading pocket, but the rest of the tracks are at grade level. All the tracks pointing down and to the left lead to a dead end that's only about 5 cars long, so switching the plant is complex. All of the inputs and outputs shipped by rail go on a single track towards the upper right and over to a "mill yard" next to the BN's West Seattle yard next to T-5. My plan is to include a (condensed) model of the mill yard, so the plant switcher will be able to receive and deliver cuts of cars to the BN as a transfer move, and then sort them for delivery to this maze of plant spots.

I recently joined the "Steel Mill Modeler's Special Interest Group (SIG)" and received a batch of recent back issues of their quarterly magazine, so hopefully this will make my modeling better informed. What a fun project! It's well timed with Walthers' recent announcement that they're re-issuing their steel building and rolling stock series, but it's probably not going to do me much good, because this is a smaller mill than their models, and has a particularly constrained site. Also, they don't move any liquid steel by rail at this plant, so our switching will be limited to moving scrap, dolomite and other additives in, steel products from the rolling mill to the shipping building, and steel products from the shipping building to the outside world. That's enough, though.

We learned a lot on the tour that I will slowly try to document here. Most interesting to me was that they have an off-site scrap sorting yard at T-105 (nearby, more on that later), so the incoming scrap is mostly coming a short distance on the BN, and the longer distance scrap moves mostly terminate at T-105. Also, the high temperature bag house which filters the air above the furnace is so laden with iron particles that they ship it by rail to a facility in Montana which extracts the iron and ships it back to be put back in the furnace! You can't make this stuff up!

Steel on!