Tuesday, August 20, 2019

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?

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