Blast Furnace scratchbuild

Unfortunately, Walthers has discontinued their latest run of their blast furnace for the Ashland Iron & Steel series, 933-2973. It had an MSRP of $263.98 in the 2016 catalog. The ones on Ebay have been going for at least that much and usually more, assuming you can find one. Walthers had an initial run of this kit back in the 1990's when they did their USS series, as far as I can tell there is no difference between the two kits. Those are still floating around and are also fetching close to $300 on Ebay.

Looks like I'm going to have to scratchbuild one. Fortunately there is a group on Yahoo Groups that is dedicated to the modeling of steel mills. There is a great deal of information available there to assist in building steel mill facilities.

Today I made a trip to Rob's Trains in Alliance, OH to raid his Plastruct and Evergreen styrene stock. $120 worth of I-beams, tubing, railings, stairways, and corrugated sheet should give me a good start on the project. Unfortunately he didn't have a lot of what I was looking for, so I will have to get the rest online.

Here is the best photo I can find of the blast furnace that was part of the Republic Steel bolt & nut factory. There is very little information available on this facility. Really all I know is it was built sometime around the late 1800's and it was torn down around 1935.

Blast furnace technology in the late 1800's to early 1900's didn't evolve much other than they kept getting bigger to allow for more production. Some blast furnaces had different features than others but the basic technology was the same.

The #1 blast furnace at Monessen Works near Pittsburgh was constructed in 1913. That will be my model to base my scratchbuilding project on. Thanks to HAER, there are scale drawings available on the internet.

Fortunately since I am basically freelancing my blast furnace on a real world structure that was torn down about 80 years ago, I will have a lot of discretion to exactly how it will be laid out. I think using the Monessen structure as a guide will get me pretty darn close.

Steel Mill Modeling

Recently I purchased The Model Railroader's Guide to Steel Mills by Bernard Kempinski (c. 2010, Kalmbach Publishing).

Before purchasing this wonderfully detailed book, I was "kind of interested" in modeling steel mill operations. Now I'm very interested. Based on what I've seen in this book, it would be very easy to construct an entire layout centered on one steel mill.

One of the references the author refers to heavily is a HAER (Historic American Engineering Record, available at the Library of Congress website, loc.gov) survey completed in 1995 on the Pittsburgh Steel Company's Monessen Works in Monessen, PA which was along the Monongahela River just south of Pittsburgh. The Monessen Works was a very large steel mill that by 1920 occupied a 2.3 mile, 160 acre stretch of riverbank along the Monongahela River. The complex consisted of three blast furnaces, a 12-furnace open hearth steel making facility, a coke plant, rod mills, wire-drawing mills, a barbed wire mill, three galvanizing plants, a nail plant, and a wire fabric mill. Of course, all that is left of it today is the coke & coke by-product plant.

The HAER on Monessen Works includes several excellent engineering drawings of key facilities of the steel mill, in particular the blast furnaces and open hearth mill. Most steel mills in the early 1900's were constructed using the same methods used at Monessen, and the Republic Steel plant in Cleveland was no exception. Armed with the HAER drawings and Kempinski's explanation of the iron & steel making process examined through a model railroader's lens, I think I can now create an accurate and operationally sound version of the Republic Steel Bolt & Nut plant on my layout.

Here are a couple samples of the HAER engineering drawings on Monessen Works. These are for Blast Furnace #1 which was completed in 1913. There are similar drawings for the open hearth.

These drawings will really come in handy for modeling purposes. The blast furnace at Republic would have been of similar construction since most blast furnaces during that time period were constructed the same way.

Unfortunately, the Walthers HO scale blast furnace kit is discontinued and out of stock.

Unless I can find one at a reasonable price on Ebay, this baby will have to be scratchbuilt with Plastruct components.