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!