A few hours Thursday night and Friday morning and the furnace component is complete (handrails attached after I took the photos). Next up in the furnace house.

Shaun Previous Layout

Looks like swapping mill and town won’t really work. Less real estate there because of how the track is running through, and I don’t wanna really tear up all the track.

So, I can still do a photo backdrop in the currently planned area to act represent the Furnace/Mill area, and simply model the inbound/outbound tracks for finished material coil cars, along with tracks to the coke oven for raw material. I think this might do well.

Tomorrow is my off-Friday so I’ll be starting work on the Blast Furnace first thing in the morning.

Shaun Previous Layout

It’s been brought to my attention that comments by visitors were getting flagged as spam. It seems the comment spam filter was a little trigger happy and basically flagged *everything* as spam.

So I’ll be: A) Fixing spam filter hopefully to stop this, and B) going back approving comments from users and replying where needed.

Sorry about that!

Shaun Previous Layout

In a previous post, I mentioned how I want to give the GERN industry a little industrial makeover using some steel mill kits.  While thinking about to do the new industry, I thought, “Why not try to make…. a steel mill?”  While I know I don’t have the gargantuan space needed to model a full mill, I might be able to compress it down some to fit into the layout.

Last night I took some poster board and cut of pieces based on the sizes in the Walther’s catalog of the Blast Furnace, Coke Oven, Electric Furnace, and Rolling Mill and arranged them up on the layout to see how they will all fit.

I could make them all fit in the space, but they’d be almost be right next to each other in line. I think it would just like kinda funny. It also wouldn’t leave a whole lotta room for trackage.

So I have a few options….

1) I could simply use the Rolling Mill kit and “selectively compress” into being both the Furnace and Rolling Mill. There’s 3 internal tracks, so 2 would be tracks to the blast furnace, and then the 3rd would be the coil car load/unload car. This reduces the industry’s footprint.

2) Simply leave the mill/furnace off the layout, and operate the mill has a remote merchant furnace, delivering molten pig iron to a remote plant for further processing. This would greatly reduce industry footprint, and I think fewer GIGANTIC mill buildings might look better on the layout.

3) Expand the footprint and get rid of the industry (which would now be GERN since I swapped GERN and the Refinery so the refinery would be a little larger) that was going to be around the corner near the end of the layout. This one may depend on much I like the Steel industry because this would make the Steel Mill rather large, almost like the “showpiece” of the layout.

4) The last option would be to swap the location of the town with the proposed mill area, with the town wrapping around the corner towards the end of the layout. This would allow me to to have the mill on the inside of the track against the backdrop, giving me the ability to make some buildings like the furnace and/or mill be half deep backdrop buildings. I would have take some measurements here to see if there’s any gain/loss of real estate though. I would also have to add a turnout on the mainline someplace to get into the mill.

I’m leaning toward option 1 or 2 right now.

Shaun Previous Layout