Iron and Steel Stockholders
The 'stockholders' 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 and foundries are discussed in more detail in 'Lineside Industries - Scrap metal Yards, Foundries and Forges'.
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'
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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