Bessemer Building and More

I started building the truss and column assemblies for my bessemer plant.   Originally I was going to need 9 of these, but I scaled back to 7.  Some prototype photos of Bessemer plants with the converters on the exterior of the building piqued my interest, so I changed my design a little.   I will still need to build some sort of framework, just not with the roof trusses.   The almost assembled truss (missing the corner braces) is sitting in the assembly jig - a simple affair - scrap 1/4" MDF with some balsa blocking glued to it (white glue)

 

The trusses started off from the Walter's Electric Furnace Kits.   The purist in me is fading as the years move on and I only have two scratch-built trusses on my soaking pit building and only one on the blast furnace.  Despite the modifications, this was far easier to do.   I believe I spoke of the components in an earlier post, but if not - I cut the truss down, for length and to give the roof an interesting look.   It was extended with a piece of .030 sheet to match my footing spacing.  I used .030 x .250 strips to wrap the pieces, creating the wide flanges.   The posts are a 1/4" column with Central Valley box lattice columns.  

Day trip - Princeton - shopping, bookstore, Thomas Sweet Ice Cream/  Dunellen - The Model Railroad Shop - Central Valley stuff for Bessemer plant, magazines, a F&C Resin heavy duty well flat, six axles,  and DVD - Big Little Railroad  (1948 film by CNJ promoting their railroad - steam/early diesel - I had this on video tape but think I lent it out a long time ago, but regardless, was happy to buy a DVD copy, plus there was extra footage of the famous Ashley Planes and the Newark Bay four-track Drawbridge.   Interestingly, there was some real good film of the Huber Breaker in full operation, which I had visited two weekends prior.  

The Model Railroad Club - Union New Jersey - Haven't been here since the 1980s  I think they added on, but couldn't remember.  This is a photo of the smaller n-scale layout on the second level.  They have a decent sized steel mill - Mostly Walthers structures.   The larger HO layout will have a steel mill too but that area, along with about 2/3rds of the layout are unfinished.  They had a very well done cement plant and a few other nice industrial complexes.  It's a very large club in terms of building size, but only one person was working on the unfinished section that day.   I managed to drag Glori into the club (she liked a HO vegetable garden and clothes line)  on the condition that we visit the animal shelter next store.   So that basically ended the day on a depressingly sad note.  

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Anthracite

Ok, so not much has changed - to celebrate my 25th wedding anniversary - I took my wife down into a coal mine.

Huber Breaker - Ashley,PA

BLACK AND WHITE

No modeling photos as they would just be of more railings and platforms on A-Furnace stoves - seems endless.   I was going through my box of photos/slides/and negatives sitting on my office floor and I pulled out some old (1986-89) black and white negatives.   For most of my college years - 1984-88 - and into the very early 90's, I shot everything in either black and white or color slides.   I didn't have a lot of money so black and white was an cheap way to shoot everything, without breaking the bank.  I processed all the film myself  in a darkroom at the student center at school, and then after, in a darkroom I set up in my apartment.   I even bought the black and white film in bulk rolls and loaded film canisters myself - almost as cheap as digital photography.   I would process the negatives and make a proof sheet of the entire roll.   Select photos would be printed, but paper was expensive, especially after college, so I limited myself.  The result was that I never actually saw full size prints of most of my shots, and over time forgot a lot of the subject matter.   Scanners make it easy now to see what's on these negatives full size.   Since a lot of what I took photos of has since been demolished, it's kind of exciting scanning this film.    One embarrassing discovery, on the heels of my 25th wedding anniversary in a few days, was the quantity of railroad and industrial photos I took on my honeymoon.  My beautiful young wife lost out to locomotives and factories on a 20:1 ratio.     This shot is Bethlehem Steel in 1987 -  the mill was in full operation, but clouds were on the horizon.   In the center of the photo is the approach to the high-line.  The track on the right is the standard gauge coke track, while the left track is the dual gauge (7'11") ore and stone track.   The overhead catenary is only for the wide gauge ore/stone electric transfer cars.    Diesels moved the coke hoppers.

Bethlehem Steel 1987 - BOF.  In foreground is the additives conveyor

Bethlehem Steel 1987 - Underneath where I was standing to take this photo was the plant railroad shops - Narrow (3' gauge), dual, and standard gauge tracks fanning out to shops.   The highline is on the right, and in the distance you can see the five blast furnaces.  #2 Machine Shop is on the left.

Narrow Gauge Locomotive - Bethlehem Steel 1987

Honeymoon 1988 - Morehead City, NC -  They were still running Whitcomb's - A guy get's a romantic exemption for that - Right?

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.  .