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American Steel Co.’s electric furnace shop


Adding a steel mill to a layout/Gordon H. Geiger T


he American Steel Company plant on my HO scale River City & Western layout uses an electric furnace shop for its steel making opera- tion. There are a couple of reasons for this. Over the years I have worked on


every type of steelmaking process used in the United States–Bessemer convert- ers, open hearth furnaces, basic oxygen converters, and electric furnaces–but I spent more time in electric furnace shops than any other. Since it has be-


DON SPIRO PHOTOS BY THE AUTHOR UNLESS NOTED


A side rod diesel pulls a string of ingot cars into the electric furnace shop (above). With the furnace tap just starting, the red hot glow of molten steel can be seen behind it. Outside of the electric surnace shop (above right) a newly painted Aliquippa & Southern SW7 cow and calf set moves a torpedo ladle. Separating the locomotive and the ladle is a model of a car used by Bethlehem Steel at its Buffalo plant to assist the engineer in coupling without dis- placing hot metal from full ladles and in positioning ladles correctly under the blast furnace. A view of the teeming aisle (far right) shows a ladle of finished steel being poured into ingot molds. In the background is a furnace with a “heat” ready to be tapped into a waiting ladle.


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come a mainstay of the current Ameri- can steelmaking industry, I felt this would make a good model. Besides, an electric furnace shop would fit in the available space on my layout better than a model of any other process, and the Walthers electric furnace kit had the ba- sic parts and structure to get started. The maximum length of the shop that there was room for was 26″, so I cut and sliced wall sections from two Walthers kits and additional Plastruct sheet ma- terial to make the walls. The width of the main shop was dictated by the truss roof girders in the kits (I was not inter- ested in building girders), but as it hap- pens that was about as wide a space as I had available. A 2″ extension was added along three-quarters of the length of the back wall to accommodate the control rooms and working floor space around the furnaces. Finally, ceiling lights were installed along the centerline of the roof girders and in the top of the addition on the back wall. The lights were attached


APRIL 2012


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