Thanks everyone for their kind words. Sure I can add some dimensions BRADA, but not for a couple of days. Most of today was spent measuring the space, the track, the cars that will be using the furnace, MTH and Lionel Slag cars are both different sizes this is important to keep in mind, anyway, the whole pouring floor is now in the computer and my friend is working on a CAD drawing at the present time. to me the Pouring floor and the position of the pillars supporting it is one of the most important to get right as this is the basis for the whole thing. Now I must make this clear my friend and I are not Steel Mill experts and our mill is not based on any mill anywhere, it will look the same or similar but is strictly freelance. If anyone wanted to build a furnace in O scale the measurements that I will give is for a freelance blast furnace in O scale nothing more, just had to make that clear! A couple of things I wanted with the Blast furnace was five tracks starting from left to right, two on one side (One for storage) for slag cars, two underneath that are capable of holding two MTH bottle cars on each track, and one further track for slag on the other (Right) side this is important for me as the layout is an operating layout and we want to deal with four pours per session. Each Hot Metal train will have one locomotive a spacer car (Old AHM Gondola) and two MTH bottle cars OR three Lionel bottle cars. The Slag trains will have one locomotive either with six MTH slag cars OR four DOUBLE Lionel slag cars (I joined two Lionel slag cars together to make these) as I felt the MTH looked so much bigger or the Lionel looked so much smaller so a double Lionel filled the roster just nice. I could talk all night about cars I use for this project there are many but lets not get to carried away even though it's taken three years to get this far it's still early days. Keep in mind this is just one way of building a O scale Steel mill there are lots of good modellers that have built mills a lot better than mine will be Dave for instance has a beautiful Blast Furnace in O scale right here on the website with some great photos.
Definition of an Operating session.
An operating session goes all day , five hours running trains, two hours eating drinking and talking every Friday. I spend the Thursday checking the paper work and printing it out, cleaning and checking Locos and staging the layout and maybe cleaning some track. I also provide the food and drinks. No wonder I need to get away now and again!! It's still fun I love it and the operators do to. Hooroo from Roo.
Friends. I would like to be able to show you photos of a beautiful blast furnace and even though I have been working on this for three months nothing so far has happened. So why am I posting a "nothing" message? First a project like this for one person to do is massive and to keep the layout operating in between all this planning and changes is also a big job so today I will show you just one change out of many that I have had to do before I start on the Furnace. The high line an important part of the Steel mill it feeds the raw materials to the furnace and I am not going into any details of how the mill works as I am no expert at anything just a person that reads and researches endlessly even my patient wife gets sick of seeing me reading endless steel books in bed every night so lets stop there! I had to make some changes to the high line and move it towards the aisle so I had more room for the Skip and machinery house. Notice also how another Slag track has been added and now the high line has another short spur for a loco or a bad order car the photos show the changes are small I know but still takes time. Roo. 
