Railworks America

I'm working on my own version of Michael Stephan's/Great Northerner's iconic Industrial Interactive Route. I didn't keep the interactive part, but I always thought the route itself was very clever and well proportioned for fun runs that wouldn't take hours, and I've rebuilding it as a coastal steel mill route. I grew up in Appalachia and the Great Lakes region and I've styled it after that world. The buildings pretty much all come from the B&LE route, and then I filled the rest in with the VNHRR, WVN, and HSC routes. The big outlier is that I used the blast furnace from the Salt Lake Extension route.

The inspiration for this route comes from roads like the Delray Connecting in Detroit, the Union RR in Pittsburgh, and the Indiana Harbor Belt in East Chicago. I also wanted to make my own route using Dick Cowan's steel mill car set, because one of the towns I grew up in was a steel mill town.

There's a lot of work left to do, and the layout of the route will definitely change a bit. Right now, the blast furnace is mostly done, as are the docks, it's just everything in between that has to get nailed down, and then there's the detail/clutter. I wish we had more buildings with open door areas, but I've enjoyed the challenge of working around that.

Can certainly see both the origins and the changes with good integration. Good work.

Spent some time today building the coke battery...I'm actually pretty happy with where it is right now, but I still have to finish the quenching end.

Great Idea... Looking forward to the remake...

Progress continues. I'm trying to get the furnace building and slabbing mill sorted. I added a little bit of detail to the inside of the teeming shop and the stripping stand.

1. The pot bringing the steel out of the furnace to fill the ingots

2. The stripping crane is in position over a hot slab

3. An IHB SW1500 prepares to pull a cut of slabs over to the sheet and tube side plant.

Looks good.

Awesome! GP38 for this in the paint shop also.

Time for some updates. I made some pretty significant changes to some of the buildings, but now they and pretty much all the trackwork are set. I just need to start filling in detail.

These are the blast furnaces. They receive iron ore, limestone, lime, and coke, and put out slag and bottle cars of hot metal.



On the left is the basic oxygen furnace, and to the right is the slab mill. Hot metal, scrap metal, and lime go into the BOF and ingots come out, ingots go into the slab mill and, you guessed it, slabs come out.



Next is the sheet and tube mill, where slabs are made into the final product, coils and different pipes. Tank cars of some of the finishing materials also go in here.



The lime plant, where limestone from the quarry is processed.



I changed the entrance to the harbor area by moving it farther back and making it a cut down toward the water.

The harbor has a bulk liquids dock, two breakbulk cargo slips, and an ore dock.



Here are some other shots of the BOF and slab mill





This is the coke plant

Thanks for your good work. Looking forward to enjoying this route.

Nice.

This looks great! Nice work!

Awesome work! Having worked in Foundry for awhile, You did a great job getting it to look real.
Stefan

Working on a repaint for the route. The B&LE and PRR both used AS-616s for hauling ore from their docks.

Definitely getting close, mainly just detail and finishing touches now