Just a thought that occured to me, but how were the sheet steel rolls unloaded from Evans coil cars and/or gondolas. My era has shifted to newer and would probably be more truck served than rail served, but I still think I would like to model an area of the factory where steel coil rolls were unloaded. I will say though that the factory will have gondolas of scrap steel picked up so it won’t be totally truck served. I’m kind of hoping an overhead crane was used or could be modeled that way because I think it would look kind of neat having an unloading area covered in aged concrete with a medium sized over head crane rusting away on it’s own set of rails with vegetation growing around it all. Heck that sounds like a scene I could win some contests with. Background is simple it will be a medium sized factory about 4 stories tall that makes products from those steel coil rolls, like bed frames or something, with finished products shipped out by truck and scrap metal pieces tossed into a gondola to be hauled off at a latter time. Doesn’t really matter what they make, the area where I got the idea from a lot of the industry/factory buildings didn’t have their names anywhere besides maybe on the main office door and maybe shipping/recieving signs.
Geez I almost forgot. And where in the midwest where there steel factories that made the steel coils. I would like to be accurate in cars. I mean if I did model it to recieve steel coils I wouldn’t want to be using like Soo line cars if they didn’t serve any steel factories. Layout is based in central/northeast Wisconsin if that helps, industrial era served by a shortline, some time in late 60’s to maybe even 80’s. My U23 wasn’t produced untill '67/'68 so I’m limited on back dating but I could have it dated all the way up to present time if I wanted.
Overhead crane. Somewhere someone probably modified a LeTourneau or Wagner toplifter to pick coils, but I’ve never see one.
Coil steel is moved either in gons, open coil cars, or closed coil cars. Closed coil cars are used when the steel’s surface finish is very important and needs to be protected, e.g., appliance, auto body, and tinplate stock – cold-rolled steel is mostly shipped in closed cars. Open cars are used for steel when the surface finish isn’t important, because it’s going to be rerolled, or pickled and galvanized, or sandblasted later. A tremendous amount of hot-rolled coil ends up in products such as highway guard rails, farm silos, fuel tanks, water tanks, truck bodies, farm equipment, and earthmoving equipment, and almost none of that has to ship in closed cars.
Also, coils can be loaded into open cars right out of the coil box, still almost red-hot, but not into closed cars, because the heat will melt the brake components or even damage the car structure itself. Steel mills like to ship hot coils because it gets the product out the door faster and means invoicing is sped up by a day or two.
The tradeoff between open cars and gons is that gons are a system car that can be used for lots of things, whereas open coil cars can be used only for coil steel. Because the steel mill’s traffic fluctuates, the railway does not want to buy enough open cars to meet all the steel mill’s needs at peak shipping day, because most of the time it would then have a lot of coil cars parked doing nothing. So it purchases enough cars to meet the base line load, then supplements with gons borrowed from the system fleet to make up for the peaks.
Steel mills rolling hot-rolled coil in the midwest in the 60s-80s time period were Chicago District. I can’t remember if Granite City rolled coil then. Might have. Chicago District mills loading for destinations west of Chicago loaded into EJ&E and IHB cars. I d
Also, CSXT and NS coil cars are common out here. Presumably they are coming from somewhere other than the Chicago area.
Another possibility is to model a steel service center. I do not know when they became common, so they may not be appropriate for the beginning of your time frame. http://www.pdmsteel.com/ssc.html
Sooooooooo most likely jsut gondolas. I partially got the idea from seeing coil cars last night driving around. After I’m done here I’m going home to see if I can find my wifes camera (hers is…5 times better than mine at least) and go back to where I saw them, see if I can get some pictures. It was in the same area where they were unloading these gigantic round steel tubes. Don’t know what they were for sure but I do believe they were base sections for wind turbines. I don’t know because you also run into then being hauled around on the freeway. I’m perfectly at home driving my little Cavalier around semis, but even I was a little unerved driving next to a 100 foot or more long steel tube driving down the road about 70. That area is all cleaned up now, but when it was warm out like even as late as fall there would be dozens of these steel tubes just laying there on the grund, a dozen or so loaded up onto flat cars, and hand full of cranes. Not sure if they were being loaded or unloaded onto the flats though, everytime I drvoe by the number of steel tubes were visually the same.
Back to the post though the one idea I did have was a factory that either made metal bed frames or the actual coil-spring metal matress frame. At least with the bed frames the steel could arrive in uncovered means, as it would get cut into lenghts, bent into shape, and painted which would mean either sand blasting, or in a more efficient/speedy process a chemical bath for paint prep. And now talking about that I just realized that could give me an opportunety to spot tanks cars of chemicals for the chemical baths. Shoot doing all that would give me enough switching opportunety I wouldn’t need to model shipments of steel coils recieved by rail. Well hows about that. I still need to come up with a few more industries, but idea I also would like to go with is like an open market area based off of a team track. Like a farmers market type setting. Box cars are spotting in a larger concrete open area
They’re coming from Chicago, Eric, or possibly Middletown, Ohio (AK Steel), or Crawfordsville, Indiana (Nucor Steel). I was speaking of EJ&E and IHB cars in the 1960-1980 time period in the upper midwest. In the far west in that period, it would be SP and WP coil cars loading at USS Geneva, and UP and D&RGW gons. I don’t think UP or D&RGW ever had any coil cars but I could be wrong – I think they made SP and WP buy them.
Steel service centers appeared in the 1970s, I think, but I don’t think they became significant until the 1980s.
Sooooooooo most likely jsut gondolas. I partially got the idea from seeing coil cars last night driving around. After I’m done here I’m going home to see if I can find my wifes camera (hers is…5 times better than mine at least) and go back to where I saw them, see if I can get some pictures. It was in the same area where they were unloading these gigantic round steel tubes. Don’t know what they were for sure but I do believe they were base sections for wind turbines. I don’t know because you also run into then being hauled around on the freeway. I’m perfectly at home driving my little Cavalier around semis, but even I was a little unerved driving next to a 100 foot or more long steel tube driving down the road about 70. That area is all cleaned up now, but when it was warm out like even as late as fall there would be dozens of these steel tubes just laying there on the grund, a dozen or so loaded up onto flat cars, and hand full of cranes. Not sure if they were being loaded or unloaded onto the flats though, everytime I drvoe by the number of steel tubes were visually the same.
Back to the post though the one idea I did have was a factory that either made metal bed frames or the actual coil-spring metal matress frame. At least with the bed frames the steel could arrive in uncovered means, as it would get cut into lenghts, bent into shape, and painted which would mean either sand blasting, or in a more efficient/speedy process a chemical bath for paint prep. And now talking about that I just realized that could give me an opportunety to spot tanks cars of chemicals for the chemical baths. Shoot doing all that would give me enough switching opportunety I wouldn’t need to model shipments of steel coils recieved by rail. Well hows about that. I still need to come up with a few more industries, but idea I also would like to go with is like an open market area based off of a team track. Like a farmers market type setting. Box cars are spotting in a larger concrete open area
I wasn’t talking about getting a car load of coil a day, but still good to know. I think I’m just going to make it some factory that ships finished product out in trucks or box cars. It will make it easier, I wont’t have to model any specific products and won’t even have to include a manufactorer name. Maybe steel sinks or something. A sink factory could work right? 200 000lbs of metal say 10 pounds a sink that’s 20 000 sinks per coil load, a coil load every 90 days, works to 222 sinks a day, divided by 3 shifts, figure around 70 sinks a shift. Consider the effect of sinks in general purpose not specifically say just commercial use sinks or just residential use sinks. One car load every 90 days might seem a little…long but it could still work out, and ya figure if something like that would make more sinks than that per shift well then just means coil loads come sooner. Well it was all just really an idea tossed out there because I like the looks of a roll of steel coil. It’s shinny [swg].
Make it porcelain-coated steel sinks (very common for kitchens in that era) and bathtubs. Now you can get 2000-cube covered hoppers of clay, too. Stainless-steel doesn’t ship in coils too often. Galvanized steel is for farm sinks and janitor closets – not a lot of those made.
Back to the original post “sheet coil steel” is not the right term. Steel is either sheet or coil. It is kind of like saying square round. It has to be one or the other. Coils can be shipped two ways. With the eye (hole in the center) horizontal to the ground or vertical (eye to the sky). Horizontal eye coils are the ones in traditional coil cars and are liftes by a big C hook on the crane (more like a sideways U). Eye to the sky coils are lifted by a gravity device on the crane that has a little stub that goes in the eye and a gripper on the outside of the coil that activates when the craneman releases a latch allowing a scissor motion that tightens the gripper against the coil. Gravity keeps pulling it tight but you still do not want to get near one in case. Sheet can be shipped a couple ways and is generally finished steel so it is mostly wrapped in mositure proof paperroclaiming the name of the mill that shipped it. Smaller load can be pallet loaded by a fork lift into a tarp covered or roofed trailer. Bigger lifts require a similar device to eye in the sky coils that has four pads that lift the stack in the same manner. As far as cars used the railroad makes that decision unless the mill owns some which I have never seen. Mill people are notorious for not caring whose hood goes on whose cars. To them they are all the same and most people probably are unaware they have caused a problem. Mills shiiping sheet and coil are most of the ones in Chicago along the lake, J&L Hennipin, IL, and Granite City in St. Louis. Dependent on the era I can give you some names and also locations if there is a specific area you are interested in. As a side note the lucky person who gets to walk the floor all day to assist in alligning the hook was called a “hooker”. It was one of the entry level jobs in steel mills. When women started getting hired they filed grievance
I just reread your original post and I think you could consider a plant that received galvanized steel and made those corrugated silos seen all over Wisconsin. The material could come in either as galv. coil or precut sheets that would be shipped in regular covered gondolas. It would be corrugated and curved in your facility and shipped to farm dealers either on flatbed trucks or flat cars along with the bolts and small pieces in a crate. That type of steel could come from any mill in the US or Canada that made galvanized steel. Many years ago the steel industry created a system called freight equalization. In essence if the nearest steel mill that made your product was fifty miles away you paid for fifty miles of freight. If the supplying mill was a thousand miles away they picked up the rest. the end result is that you as a customer can shop price and the frieght cost is the same. I still don;t understand how mills I worked at made money on some of the orders!
granite city steel near st louis received a solid train almost daily from burns harbor indiana via pc and later on cr. i think the cars were nsax reporting marks. (national steel) they were open cars of hot rolled coils for re-rolling and many of the finished coils were reshipped back mostly to the same area they came from. the inbound product was identified as “slab breakdowns for conversion” most of the finished product was going to automobile stamping plants such as fisher body at willow run michigan. evidently, the steel company did not have the facilities to perform the finish cold rolling where the steel was made and that equipment was available at the granite city mill. sort of a loads in-loads out thing if you know what i mean. a lot of the finished coils were shipped out of granite city by truck but a bunch of it went back east via rail.
I’ve been inside one place that unloads coil cars (usually NS family cars), and two that unload sheet steel. All run the cars inside to unload. Jut run the track into the building and you are set. All of these building are modern corrugated steel.
The outfit that gets coils I believe are can stock. One of the sheet unloaders is a warehouse, lots of steel over inside. The other is a fabricator of big, heavy things. Downtown there is an outfit that transloads tinplate out of boxcars, big TBOXs and DWC cars. Another place unloads structural shapes, I think they make bridges. A train won’t go into the place for a year or two, them all of a sudden they have 30 cars show up. They can unload 1-2 at a time, so it takes a while to work off the inventory of cars.
Sorry, I do realize there is a difference between actual sheet steel and steel coil. I just figured I would say sheet steel coil because I thought that would create less of a chance of someone thinking I was reffering to coil springs. I’ve been working with idea’s intigrating Walther’s American Hardware kit. So far I have two plans. One is to add DPM module kits to add onto the walthers kit, and the other is to make my factory complete from DPM. I have a feeling the make-my-own factory will be cheaper but I like the idea of adding to the Walthers kit. It will look more like the business has grown over time. But the plan was to have the American Hardware building on the layout so the truck dock faces the back wall. I would cut off the actual dock on the A H so the dock doors would be for rail only, I figure this would be a good spot to place some gondola’s for scrap metal. On the opposite end I would put a small add-on made from DPM modules, basically just a brick box with a track door one side. I planned on this as my coil unloading area. Looking at the front of the A H building, on the left wall I would put a connecting two story office made of DPM modules, and on the right side a single story loading dock area for trucks. It will end up being failry large, 4 stories tall, around 11 inches long and around 4 inches total width.
Heres the basic plan for both idea’s, although the make-it-my-own factory from DPM modulars would be a tad bigger.
I also threw this one in here to see if it would work ok. If it does end up to big not my fault, dunno how to resize plus I think the image posty thingy does automatically.
I drive past an interesting plant on the way to work. There is (or was until the last 4 or 5 months) a continuous string of coil cars, gondolas, and occasionally even flats entering with both coiled sheet and coiled wire. The single spur enters the large building where the covers and then the coils are removed. It sometimes seems that cars come in loaded one day and leave loaded the next. They don’t actually manufacture anything, they just provide an intermediate processing and coating service between the mill and the end user. Once in a while, there is a chemical tanker on the spur as well. There is also an almost constant stream of flatbed tractor-trailer rigs coming in and going out, empty or loaded in either direction, although there are more loads than empties leaving. When they are busy, there are many coils and even sometimes covers outside in the yard, with strings of freight cars and tractor-trailer rigs going in and out. They have one or two heavy 4 wheel articulated fork lifts with single forks for moving coils around the property.
Also, in my home area, there are a couple similar plants that process steel pipe. Both plants are similar to in layout to the coil plant, but recieve plain tubular product in gondolas, flats, and tractor-trailers, and ship coated products out the same way. They both have some interesting tank structures on the outside. One applies an asphalt or resin based product, and the finished pipe shows thin bands of yellow or red on the ends before the main part is covered in a black coating, and the other plant applies a ceramic slurry that is baked on the pipe. Finished product is a thick pebbly medium grey all over. Maybe the three concepts could be combined for a model to increase both traffic and the variety of cars serving the plant?
I live near a good sized rolling mill and the only ones that ever seem to have the right hoods are those newer (not that new) gray NS ones and the longer single hood CSX ones, as I assume theres nothing with hoods that long to misuse. However, with some curiosity I have noticed that that particular mill does have the habit of matching CSX hoods with stripes to other striped hoods and the stripeless CSX hoods with other stripeless. Someone must be a little anal. But on the other hand, there’s a jade green car with NYC marks (could be PC colors?) with a GT hood and a P&LE hood that seems to be captured by the mill and forgotten by the outside world. Its always sporting that pair.
In my youth, all of 20 years ago, I remember far far more gondolas with hoods. All of them are long gone now.
There sure are a lot more types of coil cars out there than manufacturers offer but thats another thread.
all the coils i saw coming to granite city from burns harbor were in open gons with 2 runners in the floor to cradle the coils. i got the impression that coils that required further processing were shipped in open cars. of course, if the same cars were to be used for finished rolled steel then it would only make sense to have the covers on both in and out. i do remember that sheet steel going into continental can and american can is st louis moved in box cars with the coils braced and blocked to the floor. perhaps it was a matter of equipment availability and how the consignee went about unloading the coils. both the can plants had enclosed docks where the box cars of coils were unloaded by forklift truck.
. My era has shifted to newer and would probably be more truck served than rail served, but I still think I would like to model an area of the factory where steel coil rolls were unloaded.
Not exactly true…Many small industries still depends on receiving raw material by rail and usually ships by truck.I know a small plastic company that receives 3-4 cars of plastic pellets a week as well as tank cars-this outfit employs around 100 workers…Its still cheaper to ship by rail and you can fit 3 trailer loads in one car.
As far as steel…There are many mini mills that ship steel coils by rail including steel sheet in coils.
Some ideas for industries…A steel drum producer,a tool manufacturer,a processor.
A large forklift can unload coils from open coil cars.
IF you want to model a much larger user of steel simply model a gate and have have the track to disappear behind a hill,embankment or concrete wall…Place stacks behind this view block.
Granite City was part of National Steel. They also owned Wierton Steel in Wierton, WV, Great Lakes in Detroit and Midwest Steel in Portage, IN. Midwest never had melt facilities and received coils from both Granite City and Great Lakes. There was a cold mill, temper mills, anneal facilities and three coating lines for chrome for canstcok and zinc hot dip as I recall. Burns Harbor was the Bethlehem plant and never shipped coils to or from Granite City to the best of my knowledge. Wierton was spun off as IPO. Midwest is now run by USX. For those who are interested every year the Assoc. of Iron and Steel Engineers (AISE) publishs a directory of all steel mills in the USA and Canada that lists all equipment information and products produced. It also lists personnel. the list includes integrated and minimills for those who are interested. It isn’t very expensive for those who want the information. .
