I am working on another building, the "slab mill" when that is finished we will go for a walk around the layout.
Now keep in mind that I have limited knowledge of Steel Mills never seen one, but I have researched Steel Mills for about three years and bought just about every American book (Thank you internet!) I could find about Steel mills including Dean Freytag's books and some Steel books I thought were useless until I went further into research and found them most valuable.
What I have done is turn the whole layout into one Steel Mill model and in my limited space have tried to pick out the most important parts of a mill that used Railroads as their sole transport system.
I like operation so their is plenty of action it may not be correct in all phases but it is near enough for what I want we run the layout every Friday just three of us and it gives us a lot of enjoyment it takes the whole day to go through the program of course there is always a lot of talk and eating and drinking as well!
I have had visitors and they are given a loco and a control panel and coached on what to do, some enjoy it, others politely tell me it is not what they would enjoy again, which is OK I can understand. Next week I will get the camera out and see what I can do for a walk around.
The large buildings are not hard to build it's the details that take time the walls and roofs are made from 3mm MDF strengthened with scrap wood then clad with Plastic sheets. I started using 3mm (1/8) thick styrene sheets from a plastic firm but it was expensive so I went to MDF which is a fraction of the cost, here is the "Slab Mill" before cladding. The buildings have to be condensed down to fit my space, these photos were taken today.
I have thought about magazine articles for this project but I am old and tired and just cannot bear the thought of snapping endless photos and writing articles which would fill a book I have proper plans in CAD drawn up by a good friend for the Blast Furnace (not the real thing the model!) the rest I just thought up in my head drew a rough sketch and away I went.
Again, thank you all very much for your interest and kind remarks. Roo.
