Reply to "Action at the Steel Mill. Friday 21-12-1972"

ROO,

You've done a great job capturing the look and feel of a Steel Mill.    I've worked at Ford's Rouge Steel Mill as the Operation/Equipment Maintenance Foreman both at the Slabbing and Hot Strip Mill.  There are a few things that can increase the believability of your Mill complex:  

1. At a real steel mill every square inch of the place is heavily covered in soot, oil and dirt!
2. The buildings are heavily soot covered.  The color will be a rusty dark orange.  (In real life when the plant released these emissions on a weekly basis, it would fallout onto your car.  If you didn't wash your car within a timely manner and with a brush, this stuff would eat away at your cars paint and pit the metal surface!)  
3. There will be many gondolas and cars of various types being beat-up and sagging pulling and carrying stuff around.
4. The steel mill employees will be wearing the green fire-resistant pants and Jacket and be very dirty from the grim that they been working in all day.  
5. The foremen have a dark blue uniform but not fire resistant.
6. Everyone needs to be wearing a helmet, but the Salaried Employees helmets will be typically white and the hourly yellow.
7. The track in many places will be bent and misshapen and barely within gauge.
8. Crossties will never look new but will vary in condition from bad to worse to missing!
9. Very high heat needs to be pouring out of some areas of the layout where the steel making operations are occurring.
10. Nary a plant grows on the property with the exception of a weed here and there.
11.  Loud noise from sirens, horns, bells on equipment that is moving around.
12.  Broken pieces of equipment, iron bars, bolts, nuts, steel rods, crushed rusty barrels, rope, etc strewn in odd places or in piles or along the track or against a building.  Just anywhere.  Make as untidy as possible.  But make the article look as useless as possible, as anything on the ground or within the building that is in good shape left unguarded will be stolen!
13.  Beat-up rusty dirt laden cars in the employee parking lot as you would be crazy to drive anything but one there.

Hope this helps!