Iron and Steel Works
and Stockholders
This section deals with the industry actually making the iron and steel and sold it in the form of ingots, sheets and bars to the foundries, forges, engineering and ship building industries. At the end of this section there is also a discussion of the 'stockholders' who acted as middle men, warehousing and selling the steel products to the engineering firms.
Rolling mills are discussed in more detail in 'Lineside Industries -Rolling Mills, Wire Drawing and Pipe Works'
Forges are discussed in more detail in 'Lineside Industries - Blacksmiths, Forges and Steel Pressing' and foundries are discussed in more detail in 'Lineside Industries - Foundries for Iron, Brass and Other Metals'.
Modelling the various iron and steel products and their associated rolling stock is discussed in the section 'Wagon Loads & Materials Handling - Wagon Loads - Metals'.
Mining iron ore is discussed separately in 'Lineside Industries - Mining metal ores and smelting non ferrous metals'
This section deals with the potential of iron or steel works and their associated stockholders on a layout. For a brief description of the processes involved, a potted history of the industry and some notes on individual companies the link below will open a new window. Close the window to return to this page.
Click here for the Iron and Steel Industry background information page
Representing iron and steel works on a layout
Although many of the British steel works closed, particularly in the 1930s and then again in the last decades of the 20th century, there remain a number of steel works operating in the country. Iron and steel making is a large scale industry in every sense, the works occupy large areas, the equipment used is huge and the railway traffic was prodigious (it is still significant). This industry was crucial to the initial development and subsequent profitability of the railways. A moderately sized steel works, even in N Scale, would be larger than the average domestic living room, however although it is largely impractical to fully represent a steel works on the average layout it is an industry worth considering on several grounds.
If you want a small shunting layout then you can base it on just a part of such a works, several of these have been built and exhibited. You get to operate virtually all types of railway rolling stock and also the internal specialised rolling stock used in the works itself. If you fancy making locomotives from kits the small engines in the steel works had a lot of character, and the kits generally cost less than larger main line engines.
If you have room for just some 'exchange sidings' where the internal railway system of the works exchanges wagons with the main line railway system you can justify a lot of varied traffic including coal and coke wagons, open wagons including drop centre and flat bogie types, hoppers of various kinds, vans and even tank wagons (the coke plants at a steel works often sold off the tar and other by-products for further reprocessing).
You can also represent just one part of the works actually on the layout, for example a loading area for plate steel or strip coils, the rest of the works traffic merely 'passing through' the layout area supposedly to the main exchange sidings for the works.
If you are very cramped for space just the branch feeding the works can be represented (this can pass through into the layout's storage/fiddle yard, so loaded rakes of wagons travel 'inwards' and empty rakes move 'outwards').
Finally you can represent not the works itself but the remote 'stockholders' warehouse and distribution point, supplying local engineering firms with their materials. This latter establishment could be anywhere in the country as there was some degree of engineering production virtually everywhere, even in very rural areas there were firms dealing with agricultural machinery.
Recovering metals from ore is called smelting, this is usually done by heating the ore to the melting point of the metal in a blast furnace. This drives off some of the impurities and others burn in the furnace to form gasses, meanwhile the required metal melts and this can be separated from other molten materials (slag) by settling them out.
As shipping the low value ore is relatively more expensive than moving the high value pure metal the smelting areas were in the main located close by the iron ore mines. There were exceptions however, the South Wales tin plate and copper smelting firms had plentiful supplies of good quality coal close to hand and used ore carried cheaply by sea from Cornwall.
Also in some cases the local industry was sufficiently strong to justify the movement of ore or partially refined metal when the local supplies ran out. A good example of the latter is the carriage of pig iron from Cleveland to the iron works in Staffordshire and Shropshire in the later nineteenth century to allow these works to continue working when their own deposits had been worked out.
The illustration below is based on information supplied by the British Steel Corporation in the mid 1980s and shows the location of the British iron and steel works in about 1980. This map would serve for earlier periods, although the actual number of works would be much greater.
Fig ___ Iron And Steel Works In Britain (as at about 1980)
Modelling an Iron or Steel Works
Note - Rolling mills are discussed in more detail in 'Lineside Industries -Rolling Mills, Wire Drawing and Pipe Works', forges and foundries are discussed in more detail in 'Lineside Industries - Scrap metal Yards, Foundries and Forges'. Iron and steel wholesale distributors or 'Stockholders' are discussed later in this section. Modelling the various iron and steel products and their associated rolling stock is discussed in the section 'Wagon Loads & Materials Handling - Wagon Loads - Metals'.
An iron or steel works is a big enterprise, in practice most layouts represent this kind of industry by having some large metal sheds on a set of sidings, the remainder of the works being on the backscene. These works were dirty and dark, no lighting was used because the material being worked was glowing, everything was rusty and streaked with black soot. Since the later 1990s a number of kits have become available allowing a more thorough representation to be built and there are now a few layouts set entirely within the confines of the works with the rest of the railway represented by a fiddle yard.
The blast furnace itself is probably the main characteristic building for an iron or steel works. Recently Walthers have introduced a number of kits of steel works structures, of these the blast furnace is probably the most useful.
Fig ___ Blast Furnaces
The molten metal was transported to the moulds in a large steel ladle, containing many tons, suspended from a gantry crane. One of the foundries at the Patricroft steel works near Manchester had a three inch thick solid steel floor as the man driving the crane had an epileptic fit and emptied the contents onto the foundry floor. This melted the bottom of the access stairs to the gantry and the fire brigade had to bring in several engines to spray water on the steel to cool it sufficiently for a rescue team to get a ladder in and rescue the unfortunate crane driver.
Pigs of iron are typically about three foot (1m) long, four or six inches (10-15cm) wide and about three inches (7.5cm) thick, as the SG of iron is 7.87 so these would weigh in at about 123 lbs (56Kg) which is about 20 per ton. The pigs could be any size required but if they were much larger they would require mechanical handling and the quoted size is based on a number of illustrations.
Pig iron has little practical value as it contains too many impurities, making it very brittle, for most jobs the iron had to be further processed into 'cast iron' at a foundry. The railways provided 'pig iron' wagons to deliver pigs to foundries, generally these had low sides and reinforced ends to avoid the pigs breaking through when the wagon was shunted. BR built some wooden five plank wagons with steel sections replacing the bottom two planks at the ends. The pigs were piled loosely into the wagon, these are heavy so the pile was generally rather small.
A representation of an iron or steel works can be confined to the backscene, the example shown below is about the minimum you can get away with. The incoming and outgoing wagons are handled on the two sidings on the left, to the right there is a link to the fidddle yard so a 'works loco' can take the empties 'in' and bring the loaded wagons 'out' of the works.
Fig ___ Basic iron or steel works using hidden link to fiddle yard
Given more space a separate track, unconnected to the railway proper, could be included, long which a works engine could shunt internal user wagons at intervals. Lima used to offer a bogie 'torpedo ladle', these had a cylindrical centre section, lined in concrete, with motors at either end which could rotate the drum to empty it. Once filled they had to remain hot as if they ever cooled they would crack. These wagons carried the molten metal from the blast furnaces to the foundries and operated only within the steel works (although you could have one or more being delivered by rail to the works). Lima stopped production some years ago but examples of this wagon may appear second hand occasionally, having one or two of these being shunted within the works would definately help set the scene.
Fig ___ Lima 'torpedo' ladle
Many of the processes involved in smelting iron and making steel required chambers lined with heat resistant bricks. Although heat resistant these bricks are not heat proof and they had to be replaced at intervals (a dirty job by all accounts), hence wagon loads of pale coloured 'fire bricks' would be a feature of both iron and steel works. The fire bricks used for steel making are (I believe) a pale pink colour
The iron and steel ingots, billets, blooms and sheets (described below) are all rust coloured due to a thin coating of 'millscale, basically rust, which builds up as the metal in processed. This coating actually protects the metal from rusting further, however where this coating is damaged by handling (for example by holding down chains on railway wagons) it accelerates the rusting process of the metal underneath and you get lighter coloured orangy streaks.
Steel Works
Steel works are similar to iron works but with an additional stage of processing as shown on the flow diagram below. Any steel works will therefore include a blast furnace, its design depending on the date of your layout.
Fig ___ Iron and steel production flow diagram
From a modeling point of view a steel works would simply be too large to contemplate as an adjunct to a layout and a better alternative would be a set of 'exchange sidings' where the railway connected with the internal rail system of the works. Many of these works had extensive internal railway systems however and such a works would make the basis for an interesting industrial layout.
There are several structures which identify an iron or steel works and many of these were large enough to serve painted on the backscene. The main structure is of course the massive blast furnace (typically a hundred feet or more high) but steel works often process coal to make coke on-site, using the resulting coal gas to fuel various processes.
Coking plant and gas holders were therefore a common feature of steel works but the gas holders in more modern works are of the waterless type and resemble oil tanks rather than the more well known telescopic gas-works type. The company name was sometimes painted on the side of the gas holder (the steel works at Ravenscraig had these 'oil-tank' gas holders with the British Steel Logo and RAVENSCRAIG on the side in lettering about ten feet high).
Fig ___ Steelworks structures for a back-scene
Steel works traffic
Incoming cargo would include block trains of ore, pig iron and scrap metal, sand (for casting moulds), limestone, coal (and possibly coke) as well as wagon loads of more exotic materials such as private owner wagons carrying lime, tankers of ferric chloride and wagons carrying carboys or tank wagon loads of acids.
British Steel commissioned some 102 ton GLW bogie tippler wagons for feeding raw materials from the docks to its Welsh steel works in the late 1970s, a typical make up for this working in the early 1980's was twenty of the wagons pulled by a pair of class 56 locos. With the fall in demand some of these have been used for carrying scrap.
Outgoing would be iron pigs or steel ingots and castings, possibly coke (after the mid 1970's when the gas works closed down) and possibly all the other products normally associated with gas works (see Gas Works for further information). Long products are so called because they come off the mill as long bars of steel, this includes various forms of girder with cross-sections shaped like an H or I (called joists, beams and columns), a U (channels) or a T. These types of steel 'section' are used for construction. Bars can have cross-sections the shape of squares, rectangles, circles, hexagons, angles. These bars can also be used for construction, but many types of bar are also used for engineering purposes. Rod is coiled up after use and is used for drawing into wire or for fabricating into products used to reinforce concrete buildings, as are some types of bar.
A lot of products are finished at the steel works but some traffic is in 'semi finished products', generally in the form of ingots or large bars of steel being shipped for further processing. Steel ingots fall into several basic sizes called billets, blooms and slabs.
Billets and blooms are used to make what are called 'long products' such as girders or wire. A billet is a long ingot, typically six inches square and as long as the available rolling stock can carry, Slaters 40x40 thou microstrip is about right for this material. They are used in making wire or rolled flat to make small sheets (which may in turn be used for making pipes). Billets for forming into thick plate are generally about twenty five tons and those used for making wire, small strip and small bars are typically only about six tons in weight.
Blooms are large raw steel ingots being shipped for further processing, this is really a post World War Two development as earlier all the work required would be one at a single iron or steel works. Blooms weigh in at abut thirty tons, they are typically about a foot thick by two foot six wide and about twenty foot long. Blooms are often loaded 'hot' onto wagons and the stock used usually has raised bolsters to allow cooling air to circulate. A slab is a large oblong section length of steel and again they are a modern development.
Slabs are big, perhaps eighteen inches thick by a couple of foot wide by twenty foot long. Slabs up to about thirty tons are sent to rolling mills for forming into rails, girders and (mainly) plates. Plate is a large, flat piece of steel perhaps 10mm or 20mm thick (although it can be up to 50mm thick) and up to 5 metres wide. It is used for example to make the hulls and decks of ships or to make large tanks and boilers. It can also be rolled up and welded to form a large steel tube, used for oil and gas pipelines.
Slabs are also used to make steel strip, normally called hot rolled coil, made by passing the hot slab through a series of rollers before being coiled and allowed to cool. Railways referred to this as 'stripcoil' and build or modified a number of wagons for this traffic from the early 1950s on. Hot rolled coil is a lot thinner than plate, typically a few millimetres thick, although it can be as thin as 1mm. Its width can vary from 150mm to nearly 2 metres. It frequently goes through further stages of processing such as cold rolling and is also used to make tubes (smaller tubes than those made from plate). In the 1980's quite a lot of slabs were exported to be rolled into long strips of steel sheet and the resulting coiled strips were then sent back to Britain.
Modelling the various steel products and their associated rolling stock is discussed in the section on Wagon Loads & Materials Handling - Wagon Loads - Metals.
Iron & Steel Works Internal Railway Stock
Iron and steel works often featured their own internal railway system with their own wagons. These were not always standard gauge however in 'N' the easiest option is to use RTR standard gauge models and parts.
The sketch below shows a non-convertible coke wagon is an internal user vehicle from an iron works in the north east, the livery dates from between the two world wars. You could use the livery on a standard Peco wagon fitted with Peco coke rails but to make the thing a little different you can produce a fairly accurate wagon by cutting away the sides of a Peco 5-plank mineral wagon kit leaving the side corner plates in place. Now reduce the height of the ends slightly, fit new sides from scribed 30 thou card and add a set of Peco coke rails.
The plate wagon could be modelled from the Peco kit, I would suggest using the fifteen foot brake van chassis with the foot boards removed. The livery shown is taken from photographs in Peter Mathews' book on PO wagons (see bibliography).
The large coke hopper wagon shows a typical livery used for internal use only at a steel works from the 1960s to the 1980s (possibly longer).
Fig ___ Internal User Stock
As part of the processing of the iron or steel the internal railway system was also required to carry various hot materials about the site. This required purpose built wagons, the sketch below shows a selection which could be used for 'set dressing' when the works proper is mainly confined to the backscene.
The simple metal box on wheels was used to move hot ingots from place to place and also as a barrier wagon to separate hot slag wagons from the locomotive and from each other. This is a simple proposition if you have any old Lima chassis in your bits box, just sand the sides a little to reduce the level of detail then add a strip of postcard folded to form a flat top and sides. Technically it should have solid ends as shown but that gets difficult with N Gauge couplers.
The short wagon with the metal shield at one end is a 'coupling wagon'. Specialised vehicles had American style 'buckeye' couplers (similar to the Kadee N Gauge coupler) and coupling wagons were used to allow locomotives with standard couplings to handle these vehicles. The best bet here would be to cut a section from the centre of a spare Lima chassis then add the top, sides and end-plate from card (plastic or post).
The simple wagon, coupling wagon and the slag wagon are based on illustrations in an article by John Allinson on his O Gauge Oval Ash B layout, which represents part of the internal railway of the former Round Oak steel works. The article was published in Your Model Railway magazine, September 1986. For the present purposes it is assumed that the slag wagon model would probably serve as 'set dressing', parked on a siding and not expected to move. Hence some compromise has been adopted to ease the modelling.
The slag crucible is cut from the end of an Olbas Oil or Vicks inhaler cap and the chassis is made using 20 thou card. The chassis consists of two side members with recesses for the wheels, these are held the correct distance apart by adding the end plates (X) and top plates (X). When dry add the wheels then fit the flat plates above the wheels (X).
The crucible needs a rim round the top edge, 10x10 thou strip will do or you could use thread glued with Uhu or similar glue. There are lifting lugs on the sides, I suggest these are most easily represented using two lengths of 10x20 thou as shown. The crucible has a pivot bar on each side (X) and on the wagon this is supported by two 1mm lengths of 1mm diameter rod (X) mounted on a shaped scrap of 20 thou card (X). The solid wheels can be any you have in your bits box, for example you may have some old Lima chassis if you have transferred the bodies onto Peco chassis. Peco wheels would do equally well but in either case you will need to cut or file the pointed bearings of the wheels flat. The wheels are visible so for Lima wheels paint the flanges 'track' colour to tone them down, for the Peco wheels paint the tyres silver.
One small point is that the slag wagons weighed in at around thirty tons, so they were moved about in short rakes. This was not a problem as four wagons would be enough to deal with one tapping of the slag from the furnace. The slag was molten and was taken to a raised bank to be tipped, if something went wrong the whole lot set solid and the slag wagons themselves would sometimes warp with the heat. One option then was to just push the wagons off the track and down the bank.
Fig ___ Specialised Internal User wagons for Iron & Steel Works
Also sketched is a slag wagon drawn from a photograph of a vehicle in a steel works at Scunthorpe. This has a flat-sided tapered crucible, slightly longer than it is wide and with rounded corners. The chassis is an alternative shape which could be used with the crucible described above.
Stockholders
Stockholders take in the plate, girders, angle, tube and (since about 1950) strip-coil from the iron and steel works and sell this to their local industries, cutting the material down to manageable sizes where required. One advantage of this industry in the present context is that goods in often looked remarkably like the goods shipped out, reducing the need for wagon load adding and removal.
A notable exception to this is strip coil, this would be the inward cargo, going out would be sections of plate cut from the long strip. As an example Philip Holmes was able to advise that a local firm in Manchester in the 1980s regularly took in coils of 0.5 inch and 0.74 inch strip coil steel and guillotined this down to produce strips 9 inches wide 15 inches long to be used as the wheel rims for 'Bobcat' mini-cranes. The strips were steel12 at a time. These sets were then stacked with strips of timber between them and re-banded to produce a block, the timber strips providing access for the prong of a fork lift truck.
A related problem regarding the appearance of loads on wagons is that the services offered tended to be cutting (sawing or guillotining) as well as shot-blasting and painting (or coating), hence plates and girders and particularly tubes might arrive looking rather battered and rusty but would often leave looking smooth and with a coating or reddish brown primer. One solution is to route the sidings into a hidden loop connected to the fiddle yard, allowing 'full' and 'empty' trains to traverse the layout in the appropriate directions.
Fig___ Hidden loops for a stockholders yard
Given the nature of the work a characteristic feature of a stockholders yard was a selection of cranes, fixed and mobile. In the context of a model railway the establishment could be represented by an open-sided shed on the backscene (this requires an inch or two of depth to allow the stacked metal to be shown inside), faced by a yard with inset railway tracks and a gantry crane. The example shown below is at a former goods yard (built in the 1830s and closed in 1975), it was for a time an engineering works and is now part of the Manchester Museum of Science and Industry, this example is actually rather narrow for a stockholders yard but would be acceptable for a small firm on the fringe of a town.
Fig___ Large gantry crane suitable for a small stockholders yard
Tube and hollow section steels have often been a specialist area for stockholders, the only difficulty is cutting the required number of tube sections dead square and to the same length for the stacks in the yard. In N steel tube is very thin, hence you can cut Plastruct tube more or less to length then add a paper wrapper extending beyond the end of the plastic to give the required wall thickness to the tubes. As it is a lot easier to cut strips of paper to length you end up with better looking pipes.
Fig___ Steel tubes stores in a stockholders yard
The stock range of a stockholders tends to be diverse and might include 'Merchant Bar' (Rounds/Squares, flats, Tees, Angles and Channels), 'Construction Steel' (Universal Beams and Universal Columns - Some stocked with a primer painted finish), 'Sheet Stock' (Hot Rolled Sheet and Plate, Cold Reduced Sheet, Galvanised Sheet, Floor Plates (Durbar Pattern), Open Steel Floor Grating and galvanised Weld Mesh), 'Engineering Steels' (Bright Mild - Round, Flat, Hexagon and Angle, Precision Ground Stock and Alloy Steels). Larger yards might also carry 'Hollow Sections' and 'Tube' (including black Gas pipe (modern pipe to BS 1387), as well as Black and Galvanised Electric Resistance Welded Tube & Box section, Seamless Tube - Hot Finished & Cold Drawn) although pipes and tubes tended to be a specialist area. As well as the steel sections they might also carry Elbows and Fittings, End Caps, Pallet Feet, Stair Treads, Handrail Stanchions, Fixings and Consumables.
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