I asked this question in the General Topics Forum with no responses, maybe someone in this group can help.
I’m helping my neighbor build a steel mill module for his garage N scale layout.
He started by purchasing the Walthers kits for the Blast Furnace and the Rolling Mill. The other industry related builds were either kit bashed or scratch built.
As the module nears completion, the only problem is that we can’t find the necessary rolling stock to populate the mill area.
Walthers makes one reference to Minitrix as a source for the Hot Metal and Slag Ladle cars. Searching the internet has yielded no further information or sources for these cars in N scale.
Does anyone have any information on a source for these cars. Our only other alternative is to scratch build these units.
What you need is Dean Freytag’s new Cyclopedia of Industrial Modeling. There are some suppliers he lists who are real basement operators – including himself
His steel book for Walthers, if you can find a copy, should also give you all the info you are looking for
Dave Nelson
Thanks for the response, Dave, I’ll check into that.
The biggest problem we’ve been encountering is finding it in N scale, Walthers and others offer these cars in HO, buy us poor neglected N scalers have to scratch and claw for them.
Well I see the problem. I was thinking of HO myself
Here is one idea – take a good long look at the European models. Some of them might be more easily modified into the truly strange rolling stock found at a steel mill, such as the hot metal cars and the very short ingot flat cars.
Dave Nelson
You can scratch off the need for slag cars. Blast furnaces don’t use them. the volume is too great and every blast furnace I know of has two large rectangular pits they dump slag into. they dump on one side for about two weeks while the other one is dug out with a front end loader and hauled away in Euclid dump trucks. they are generally made of interlocking steel piling and are about 10 - 12 feet above grade on the furnace and two sides. the back end is closed with a mound of old slag.
Mike, Plastruct sells an HO kit for 12 wheel Pollock Bottle cars. According to their catalog, that kit is based on a Dean Freytag article in the November 1994 Railroad Model Craftsman. Your friend might be able to use the article and some plastic stock from Plastruct to scrach build some cars in N. If Customer Service at this site can’t provide a repro copy, try the Kalmbach Memorial Library at NMRA Headquarters.
Bob
Thanks for the information on the slag cars, your comment keyed my brain to something I saw over at Granite City Steel when on a road trip, doing researsh and taking pictures. We saw a large front loader moving a humunguos glob of what I’m now sure was slag.
We now have a large two part bunker below the slag troughs of the blast furnace to accumulate the slag.
The hot metal cars didn’t worry me, I have a source for a lathe. The cylinders are symetrical and the pedestals on each end can be made from styrene sheet and angles.
The amazing thing about this project is that the worse the finish looks, the more realistic it is. Steel mills look terrible, evidently they never repaint anything?
They do paint but lets face it, steel mills are dirty places with hot metal around. You start to get nervous when a train of flats with very hot slabs (up to 1500 deg. F) goes by your blocked car at a crawl and you can feel the heat through the glass. you wonder if the paint on your car is going to start blistering at times. Park one of them next to a building and there goes some of the paint. Most mills paint about every ten years subject to the economy.