American Steel Co.’s electric furnace shop
repeat the trip to the furnaces. These moves must be made several
Next to the electric furnace plant is a scrap yard (above) where a crane unloads gondolas and loads the scrap buckets headed for the furnace. Behind the scrap yard is the lime re- ceiving plant where the limestone is transferred by conveyor to holding bins. The ship- ping building (below) has tracks for loading coil, structural products and pipe products.
times during a session to keep up with the charging and tapping cycles of the steel-making furnaces, typically three to four hours in 1960, but keep in mind that there are two electric furnaces, so the pouring track cycle time is about two hours. The above moves are all rou- tine and continue throughout a shift. Interspersed with these are unsched- uled moves that involve work by the ASC switchers, as well. There are coal chemical tank cars to be spotted and picked up at the coal chemical plant as- sociated with the coke plant. There is an open hopper to be located under the blast furnace dust catcher to recover the fines from the off-gases; it must be transferred to the RCW interchange to be sent out of town for sintering else- where. Boxcars carrying refractories for use in the blast furnace and the electric furnace, and alloys for the steel shop must be collected from the RCW and moved to their respective plants for un- loading. Additionally, product samples are occasionally set out at the metallur- gical laboratory for testing.
Product shipping is handled by the local RCW switcher, which services a number of industries as well as the ASC shipping building.
The local
switcher sets out and picks up cars from a freight that runs as a turn. As you can see, there is a lot of work to be done by the ASC crew during an oper- ating session. Two crews, one in the iron-making (east end) arena and one in the steel-making (west end) plant are typically needed, and coordinating traffic with the RSC and yardmaster adds to the task.
Motive power is varied between ses-
shore of Lake Michigan to the steel plant in Blue Island, Illinois, a dis- tance of about 20 miles; every day. Jones & Laughlin once moved hot met- al from Aliquippa Works on the Ohio River to Cleveland Works, a distance of over 100 miles, for a short period of time during a blast furnace outage in Cleveland, losing only about 100 de- grees in temperature. ) The west ASC switcher picks up the hot metal cars and moves them into place to be emptied into a ladle for charging the furnace. Similarly, the switcher is kept busy moving loaded and empty scrap cars between the scrap yard and where the scrap bucket is filled for charging the furnaces, and it also handles the lime hoppers. The empty lime cars are swapped for
78
loaded cars at the lime discharge, where it is transferred via a conveyor to lime hoppers for charging the fur- naces. After the scrap is melted, the hot metal and lime are added and oxy- gen is injected into charge to reduce the carbon content to what is desired for the batch. The furnace is tilted and the “heat” is tapped into a waiting la- dle, which is moved by a crane to the teeming aisle to fill the ingots. Another ASC switch engine waits on the ingot teeming track, and when the molds are all poured it pushes them into the ingot stripper. After the molds are pulled off the hot ingots are moved to the soaking pit in the rolling mill. The empty ingot molds are returned to the stripper, coated with a mold re- lease, and replaced on the buggies to
sions. There are Republic Steel NW2’s, EJ&E Alco 660’s, a GE 45-tonner, a Bethlehem Steel 40-tonner, a U.S. Steel VO-1000, an Inland Steel SW7, a Re- public Steel 0-8-0, an Aliquippa & Southern (J&L) SW7 cow and calf, a J&L SW1200, and a Philadelphia, Bethlehem & New England (Bethle- hem Steel) SW7, to choose from. Some have been purchased painted, and some have been painted and lettered to match photos in the book Steel Mill Railroads in Color and other sources. Although the layout space is limited and the length of trains moved is short, sometimes one car at a time, essential- ly all the moves of a real integrated steel plant are present. All it takes is a little imagination to feel the intensity of the operation and to appreciate the amount of coordination it takes to run one of these plants and make steel. More about the River City & West- ern can be seen on the web at www.
rcwrr.com.
APRIL 2012
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