Lukens Steel and Neat Book Store

The Brandywine Valley Railway must have acquired some of these Canadian, Sidbec-Normines ore cars for mill use

 

Melt Shop of former Lukens Steel Plant - Got to tour this facility and the rolling mills years ago.  Very interesting facility - no photos allowed back then unfortunately.    The melt shop wasn't anything very different than a number of other melt shops I'd toured back then, although I liked their zombie switchers that moved scrap remotely into the other side of this building.   The rolling mills were real interesting - standing there watching a hot slab being rolled on the 200 something inch mill.

The Book Barn - Five story used bookstore - could have spent three or four hours in here, but only had one.  Winding, narrow staircases,  exposed beams and thick rough cut timber floors - the store is a maze.  They had a copy of Johnson's Blast Furnace Construction for $25    Would have purchased in the past, but have a PDF of the book on my computer and trying to keep my book collection only to the essentials, ie unavailable elsewhere.    Did buy an Arcadia book on the Wilmington, Delaware waterfront and two Osprey Books - Saracen Strongholds AD 630-1050 and Ancient Greek Fortifications 500-300BC      While not necessarily meeting the requirement of "essentials" Osprey Books are highly detailed, well illustrated, and take up very little space.  The builder in me likes their Fortress Series

NON-BRAZIL RAILFANNING

The plant is mostly gone, but the US Pipe GE 45 tonner sits as a lonely sentinel, I guess retained incase they ever decide to ship pipe from the Alabama plant by rail.    This little engine that could used to spend all day shuffling gons full of scrap, and hoppers of coke and limestone about.    The cupola furnaces were located just behind the single story structure in the background.

Down the street from my house on Monday - TTX flat with a heavy fabricated H-Column load.    There was also a CSX coil car a few cars down the train.    Except for a large paper processing plant in the next town over, all the freight on this train is destined for my home town, Hainesport, also the end of the line.  6-25 car trains five days a week - nice mix of cars - refers, boxcars, flats, pulpwood type flats, gons (rebar), high side gons (trash), skelton flats (containerized flats) , center bean bulkhead flats, and coil cars.   Ironically, no tank cars or covered hoppers, as all the trains headed south out of Camden are virtually all covered hoppers and tank cars, newly including, unit tank trains of crude oil from the shale oil deposits out west.    South Jersey is sort of unique in that there are no through trains - all the lines out of Camden terminate eventually, except for the old Camden and Amboy from Camden to Bordentown, which is light rail during the day and a few freight customers at night.  

STEEL MAKING, BRAZIL STYLE

My brother has been working in Brazil and he sent me a "railfan" photo taken near Mangaratiba, which is located on the coast about an hour and a half southwest of Rio.     The hoppers/gons in the photo looked to be carrying iron ore, and upon some investigation on Bing Maps, Birdseye view, I was able to locate these, the only tracks in the area and follow them to their nearby terminus - a huge iron ore export operation on a small island, connected to the mainland by a long railroad bridge over the Atlantic Ocean.    Two ore ships were being loaded, with another half dozen anchored, waiting their turn.   Some more research - the entire export is only a few years old.

Aerial view of the export pier thanks to Bing - check out the size of that ore ship, its a monster -  five tugs just to push it to the dock.   Notice the large loop for trains to reverse direction without disconnecting the locos.

 

I followed the tracks back toward Rio, with the hope of eventually finding the iron ore mines, but the tracks split hopelessly into five or more lines in Rio, and as you know the country is pretty large so I gave up.  But just as I was getting into Rio, I noticed this operation - It's a steel mill built by Thyssenkrupp about three or four years ago.  The coke works is on the far left, with the ore, mineral, and coal storage next,  two blast furnaces, a BOF, and a continuous caster.    They also have their own deep water port just off the photo to the left, presumably to import coal and maybe ore too.  The very long pier is equipped with an equally long conveyor belt that ends at the coke works and the mineral storage yards.    The plant produces steel slabs that are shipped to Thyssenkrupp plants in Alabama and Europe, for finishing.  .  

SCENERY AND TURNOUTS

Action shot with some base scenery down.  Still much to do in terms of details etc.

Turnout control - Ground throws installed on layout fascia  for easy control and keeps hands off the layout.   Steel wire in a 3/32 tube.  Frogs powered by Tam Valley Juicers (blog entry on these awhile back)

Ingot Train

A-FURNACE - Part 40

Trying to get back to my regimen of model railroading.  Since spraying the track in the blast furnace area, I have a whole new area to scenic.  The past few nights have consisted of installing one or two ground throws (not as easy as it sounds as most of the throws are on the edge of the layout, connected to the turnouts using styrene tubing and steel wire) - then ballasting or ground foam on a section, usually one or two bottles of thinned glue - finally working the rest of the evening on the A-Furnace stoves.   Lately, the work has focused on the upper clean-out access platforms and the upper walkway railings.

Four stoves - four upper platforms per stove - endless.   Out of the 16 I have  11 complete - 3 that are just platforms only  (no railings or supports) - and 2 that have to be installed.  The work left will have to wait until I turn the stoves around, only when I'm done everything on the current side.  Lots to complete still - three or four hot blast valves - two trolley cranes - mixer valve platform - upper walkway railings and bracing - chimney valves - etc....  You get the picture.  

FREE-MO RIP

We broke up and threw out our four Free-mo modules today.  Sad, but we are going in a different direction in terms of Free-mo.  Eventually we plan on each building a new, smaller module, with a single smaller industry as the focal point.      The modules had become too bulky to store, transport, and set up.  The only time hauling them was worthwhile  for us was to a Steel Mill Meet or Timonium - both multi day events.    A larger problem, however, was that because of our storage situation, it was hard to pull a module out between shows to work on, and even then, the module could only be set up outside.  100% of the work on these four modules occurred in the week before a show, sometimes in February on our front porch.    Our hope is that a smaller module will be easier to set up inside somewhere and leave set up to work on for a greater length of time.    In hindsight I should have tried to sell or give away these modules - I thought I would be able to salvage the trackwork and reuse on my permanent layout or on the new modules, however, I was only able to recover about 25% of the turnouts and track.  The caulk that I had used to install the track was impossible to break down with water and using a putty knife to gently separate the delicate track didn't work well.   Amazing tenacity for inexpensive latex caulk.  

Train Fix - Inspiration

Delivering Iron Ore to HARSCO, running the  P-7 Ore Drag.  The train was loaded at the Philadelphia docks - half the cars were left at the Harrisburg, PA HARSCO plant shown here, the other half destined for Pittsburgh.  Three six-axle Alco Century units pulled this heavy train.      It was part of a much needed train fix last night at Rick Bickmore's Harrisburg Terminal Layout.   I spent most the night running through freights, ore drags, and one local freight.   The latter I screwed up slightly by missing three pickups/set outs at McClay Street and heading straight to Capital Street, where the majority of the trains work was.   The McClay Street work was an easy trailing point siding when heading eastbound, but switching it on my westbound return run to the Division Street Yard, I had to tie up both mains to run around the train, much to the ire of the Harris Tower Dispatcher and three other train operators.   I managed to get the work done and pull of the main into the Division Street Yard just in time for the Trailer Train Hot Shot.    Running trains last night has actually inspired me enough to head downstairs as soon as I post this and work on some projects.