TMS ONLINE | TMS PUBLICATIONS | SITE MAP An Article from the September 2002 JOM: A Hypertext-Enhanced Article

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INTRODUCTION

“Where men are men when the heat is on. Sulphur City U.S.A.”

Graffiti that once decorated a wall in the now defunct Sharon Steel Mill complex in Farrell, Pennsylvania, lives on in the small-scale replica of the Sharon Steel Mill at the Carnegie Science Center’s Miniature Railroad & Village in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (Figure 1). That is, if you know where to look.

Figure 1. At the Carnegie Science Center in Pittsburgh, a miniature railroad display features elements of Pittsburgh’s history, including a steel mill replica called the Carnegie Steel Company. The display is based on the original Sharon Steel Mill in Farrell, Pennsylvania.

Figure 2. The Carnegie steel display features realistic reproductions of the steelmaking process, including a cast shop, where ingots appear to glow with heat.

Painted on a wall not visible to the casual observer, the graffiti is only one of many details recreated in this miniature model replica, which was built from blueprints of the original mill.

The Sharon Steel Mill replica is not alone in the modeling world. Whether for public or personal display, model railroaders take a serious interest in recreating metal production. For many modelers, reproducing accurate and detailed metal production facilities is more than just a hobby. Painstaking detail and immense amounts of research go into each piece of these displays.

MODELING THE SHARON STEEL MILL

In designing the Carnegie Science Center model, Michael Orban, manager of the Miniature Railroad & Village and one of the modelers of the steel mill, took original blueprints from the Sharon Steel Mill, reduced them on a photocopy machine, and used the shrunken blueprint as a pattern to build elements of the mill. Prior to his work at the Carnegie Science Center, Orban worked creating scale models for architects.

How much work went into this project? Orban pulls out a three-ring binder stuffed with handwritten notes, photocopies of original blueprints of the Sharon Steel Mill, pages from books on steelmaking, articles from the era depicting the human side of the steel industry, poetry and legends associated with the steel industry, photographs—all research for building the model steel mill. Orban toured the original mill as well, taking notes and plenty of photographs.

He even found an early edition of U.S. Steel’s The Making, Shaping and Treating of Steel, the steelmaker’s bible, according to Orban. This edition, published in the early 1900s, lent the modelers valuable insight into how steel was made at the time, a necessary detail if the mill was to fit in with the turn-of-the-century theme of the rest of the village.

The model includes a number of moving parts that simulate a working steel mill. A clamshell bucket lowers from the long ore bridge, scoops the ore from the trenches, and carries it to the skip cars, which transport the ore to the top of the blast furnace and dump it in. Orange lights glow from the casthouse floor to simulate flowing molten metal, and orange ingots appear to shine as they cool (Figure 2).

The display even featured a mechanism that would lift entire hopper cars filled with ore and dump the ore for distribution in the ore yard, as in the car dumper of the original Sharon Steel Mill.“But that only worked for about an hour,” Orban said.

All in all, the project took about two and a half years, Orban said. But even now the complex is a work-in-progress. Empty spaces in the model stand waiting for the Bessemer converters that will eventually be installed—once the modelers decide how to best recreate them, that is. The problem is recreating the colors of the molten steel and the smoke the Bessemer gives off. Orban says the museum is considering using fiber optic strands to create the needed shifting colors.

The entire village is built on what modelers call an O-scale, where 1/4 inch equals one foot, but the steel mill had to be shortened a bit in the interest of space. The production process shown on the railroad platform depicts the transformation from raw material to ingot. While the model could depict further processing of the ingot, it would take up too much of the display, Orban said.

See figures a–g for additional photos.

Figure 3. The Mitsubishi process, commonly used in copper production, smelts nickel at Jeff Borne’s model nickel production facilities.		Figure 4. Retired steel worker Art Griffith constructed this blast furnace for the train display at Oglebay’s Miniature Railroad & Village in Wheeling, West Virginia.

MODELING FREELANCED METAL PRODUCTION FACILITIES

While the Carnegie Science Center display recreates a specific steel mill, other modelers choose to create fictional facilities, called freelance displays. Dean Freytag, a model railroader in Ashland, Ohio, built an entire fictional steel complex in the basement of his home and called it Davies Steel, after his late wife’s maiden name (see figures h–k).

“CARNEGIE STEEL COMPANY”

Figure a.   Figure b.   Figure c.   Figure d.   Figure e.   Figure f.     Figure g.       (a) The original Sharon Steel Mill in Farrell, Pennsylvania consisted of two blast furnaces sharing a common casthouse floor. (b) The Carnegie Steel Company’s replica of a Sharon Steel Mill blast furnace. (c) A train rounds the track surrounding the fabrication portion of the plant. (d) A ladle pours molten metal into a converter.(e) The car dumper at the original Sharon Steel Mill and (f) at the Carnegie Science Center display. (g) The rear view of the Carnegie display.

“DAVIES STEEL”

Dean Freytag’s fictional steel corporation, Davies Steel, includes (h) a rolling mill, (i) a downcomer, dust collector and gas cooler (j) an electric melt shop, and (k) a baghouse. The display also features, among other things, two blast furnaces, one built from scratch.     Figure h.   Figure i.   Figure j.   Figure k.

Freytag, who has authored more than 60 articles and two books on modeling the steel industry, says he chose not to base the plant on any particular mill, so that no one could point at it and say,“That’s wrong.”

Though Davies Steel is a fictional company, it is the result of the careful research of actual steel mills, mostly through first-hand observation. Freytag and his wife, Ann, took many field trips to steel mills in surrounding areas such as Cleveland and Youngstown. Freytag, too, owns a copy of U.S. Steel’s The Making, Shaping and Treating of Steel for reference, this one a more modern edition.

Though modelers creating freelanced railroads generally strive for accuracy in their models, they find that they can stretch the limits of traditional metals production facilities when necessary.

Jeff Borne, a model railroader who is currently producing an instructional two-part video series on modeling a detailed blast furnace, chose to bend the rules of nickel production a bit when he realized that a traditional nickel smelting facility would take up too large an area on the display set up in his home.

So he wrote to Mitsubishi Materials Corporation and asked if their more compact Mitsubishi process (Figure 3), used in copper smelting, could be used to smelt nickel.

“They said, ‘Well, yeah, it could be used for nickel.’ Then I had some other engineers say, ‘No, it would never work’,” Borne said.

Regardless, the Mitsubishi process stayed a part of the nickel production facilities. Borne may, however, rebuild the plant with more traditional copper smelting in the future.

CREATING METAL PRODUCTION FACILITIES

The Basics

Until recently, modelers interested in recreating steel mills in miniature had to build them from scratch.

Borne constructed a train layout that featured both steel and nickel production facilities, and included a hand-made blast furnace.

“It’s totally scratch-built; there’s no kit parts on that one. There are only about ten of us in the United States who have done one,” said Borne. “You’ve got to have the motivation to do it, because it’s a lot of work. I worked on it for probably half a year.”

Freytag and steel industry veteran Art Griffith are part of that exclusive group who have scratch-built models of blast furnaces.

In 1982, Art Griffith, a 35-year veteran of the steel industry walked into the Miniature Railroad & Village display at the Oglebay Resort & Conference Center in Wheeling, West Virginia, and asked if he could build a blast furnace for their display.

“He completely hand-made the blast furnace from scratch, from memory!” recalls Steve Mitch of the Oglebay Miniature Railroad and Village. “It took him two years to construct and paint it to look authentic.”

Using only some basic modeling materials and his memory, Griffith built a blast furnace (Figure 4) that featured beams, stairs, corrugated siding and roofing, and pipes all created from two sheets of styrene plastic. The complex was named the A.C. Griffith Steel Corporation, in honor of Griffith, who died in 1997. The furnace has been a permanent fixture on the display since its completion in 1984.

Now, however, steel mill modeling is accessible to a broader group of modelers because of kits available from William K. Walthers, a company that manufactures and distributes model railroad equipment.

“Six or seven years ago, I worked with the William K. Walthers Company, whose first industrial theme was steel, which opened the doors of this fascinating industry to thousands of modelers,” said Freytag.

The Details

Whether building from scratch or from a kit, details are key to railroad models, and creative solutions are always best.

“Anything goes, as long as it can’t be eaten or degrade,” Orban laughs.

Some details of the miniature Sharon Steel Mill are authentic. The iron ore lying in the ore yard is dust from the floor sweepings of U.S. Steel’s Edgar Thomson Plant in Braddock, Pennsylvania, where iron ore is converted into steel. Other details are improvised, using everyday items, like the wooden bells bought from craft stores that form the slag ladles.

To make his cars appear more authentic, Freytag heats and then deforms the heated material, placing dents in the sides of cars that transport metal. To create a weathered effect on his buildings, Freytag does not clean his airbrush between painting one building and another, leaving the buildings with a sooty, well used look. Other details on Freytag’s display include orange beads meant to simulate molten metal in the hot metal cars and coffee that acts as a tank of wastewater.

WHY MODEL METAL?

Why do modelers choose to recreate mills and metal production facilities? Some just have a personal fascination with the industry, while many displays incorporate them as an important part of an area’s history.

The latter is certainly the case at the Carnegie Science Center and Oglebay displays. Both railroad displays depict turn-of-the-century local culture.

Oglebay’s blast furnace is just one piece of a display that attempts to recreate early 20th century West Virginia Appalachia. The display also features a coal mine, logging operation, saw mill, and a mill town.

The Sharon Steel Mill takes up a major section of the train display at the Carnegie Science Center, which also includes a limestone mine, amusement park, baseball field, and other attractions from the era. Orban said the steel mill is such a prominent part of the 25-by- 9-meter display because of the importance of the steel industry to the Pittsburgh area.

“It is a reflection of technological and industrial development in Pittsburgh,” Orban said. “Pittsburgh was the forge of the nation.”

The science center chose the Sharon Steel Mill in particular for a variety of reasons. The mill was a manageable size to reproduce; it was created in 1896, so it fit in the time frame of the rest of the railroad display; and original blueprints and photos of the mill were available.

Neither engineers nor steel workers by profession, modelers Freytag and Borne chose to model steel and nickel production simply out of an interest in the industry.

“When I was about eight years old, my parents got a set of encyclopedias, and I had the iron and steel section and said ‘This is fantastic!’ and so I’ve pretty much been a hot metal fan ever since,” said Borne.

A POPULAR HOBBY

Within the hobby of model railroading, the modeling of steel and other metal industries has a number of enthusiastic followers. Borne and Freytag are both members of the Railroad Industries Special Interest Group, a non-profit group affiliated with the National Model Railroad Association. The group consists of modelers interested in the industries served by railroads. Of the 200 group members, approximately 80 percent are steel fanatics, according to Borne.

Borne has already received 50 orders for the first video in his two-part series, Superdetailing a Walthers Blast Furnace, which is scheduled for release this month. The video shows modelers how to make a steel mill kit into a museum-quality model.

Likewise, Freytag’s first book, The History, Making and Modeling of Steel, published in 1996, is now sold out. His second book on modeling the steel industry, Cyclopedia of Industrial Modeling will be published in late 2002.