Republic Steel. Multi purpose, Multi era, Multi region

[kevsmiththai]

Hi everybody

 

My latest layout was built to feature the Marklin Blast Furnace available as a kit a few years ago. The layout is quite small being only four foot eight inch by two foot  and is intended to be used in a variety of different ways. Firstly as a stand-alone layout, handy for taking to one day model railway exhibitions, secondly as an additional board for Cuyahoga, my Nickel Plate road layout, and also as an extra board for Tapton Junction my new British outline Z layout currently under development.

 

 

 Blast Furnaces by their very nature look similar all around the world and also vary in appearance on slightly over the decades so can be multi purpose. The layout can be run as late 1990s Union Pacific/Southern pacific, 1950-60s Nickel Plate road both in America, Blue Era British rail 1970-80s and steam era Japan.

 

 

Although nicely moulded, the Marklin kit it is simplified down for ease of manufacture and benefits from a lot of superdetailing. It is quite large and takes up a big area of the baseboard but shows how large they are in real life and how small trains look in comparison. Considerable work was done on detailing the casting house floor, tower itself and the adjacent dust catcher, cold air blast area. Lots of lighting including a bank of flickering LEDS at the base of the tower where the slag and metal channels are situated, aircraft warning lights and a high intensity red led pointing upwards through the aperture at the top of the tower. The considerable weathering was done with ‘Hycote’ acrylic aerosols Red Oxide primer, Grey Primer and matt Black. Because it is quite fragile and heavy it is fastened to the baseboard at various points with 8BA bolts.

 

Few Blast furnaces stand in isolation, so to keep the furnace in context it is surrounded by the associated blower house, hoist house, power house and cooling towers and like most steel works miles of piping is in evidence. The fiddle yard at the rear is situated inside a large Open heart furnace building, these are also huge in real life and the scratchbuilt structure is only five bays long whereas in real life they can be up to 16 bays long. All of the ancillary structures and the ore yard, pipebridge and ore crane are all scratch built and weathered. The finished products yard crane is an N scale container crane.

 

More soon

Kev

 

[kevsmiththai]

Once the blast furnace was assembled it took some working out how it was going to sit on the baseboard. The ‘high line’, the elevated tracks behind the furnace where iron ore, coke and limestone are dumped out of hopper cars, need to line up with the upper section of Cuyahoga, so the furnace needed to be front left as the public see it. In addition I wanted to use as much Marklin sectional Z track and points as possible to show what is possible with it. Baseboard is conventional planed timber construction with a 6mm MDF top. It took some shoehorning in to get all of the necessary areas rail served and as a result has tighter curves than I normally use on my layouts.

 

To bring the layout to life Preiser figures are used and the road vehicles are a mixture from various suppliers with pride of place taken by some superb American cars made by Laszlo in Hungary. period japanese cars and trucks are proving a problem though

 

I’m now working on animating the layout more with experiments proceeding on using a stage smoke generator to reproduce the less than healthy atmosphere around a steel works and I plan to get to one of the U.Ks remaining blast furnaces to record the sounds associated with a blast furnace in operation.

 

 

 

 

However, I could do with some help. When i run it in Japanese form I'll put some signs over the Republic Steel ones. Can anyone suggest a suitable place to find info or better still, can someone show me what 'Republic Steel' would like like translated in Japanese Script?

 

Cheers

Kev

 

[cteno4]

Excellent model Kev! Really a nice show piece. Kudos!

 

Jeff

[railsquid]

However, I could do with some help. When i run it in Japanese form I'll put some signs over the Republic Steel ones. Can anyone suggest a suitable place to find info or better still, can someone show me what 'Republic Steel' would like like translated in Japanese Script?

 

 

Rendered phonetically:

リパブリック・スチール

 

but a geniune Japanese company would be called something-製鋼

I suppose you could translate literally as "共和国製鋼" (Kyouwakoku Seikou) though "共和国" in a name doesn't sound very Japanese.

[ToniBabelony]

Nice! This sense of massive industry can be achieved in Z very well. That must have taken quite a while to set up. The grass in the foreground however I doubt would look that healthy and green in such a setting though.

 

As for the name in Japanese, just use 共和 without the 国, as there actually is a station called 共和 (kyouwa) in Aichi prefecture!

[railsquid]

That would work, there's a "共和工業" for example.

[kevsmiththai]

The grass in the foreground is actually a cunning bit of scenery I use for photography. It can clamp onto the front of any of my Z layouts using quickclamps and increases the depth of the foreground and hides the baseboard edges and allows a lot more scope in picture composition. there is an end board extension as well

 

You can see in this shot at the High line end the two boards in place

 

 

I mentioned the idea of animating the layout with lights and smoke. early progress can be seen in this video

 

https://youtu.be/W7G8m7A8N_I

 

and video of the layouts debut at Bradford MRC show

 

https://youtu.be/jUQgfFSux1c

 

My Rokuhan C11 should be arriving tomorrow (it has just cleared customs) and looking at the new releases I'm going to have to get a couple of C57s when they come out

 

More later

 

Kev

[kevsmiththai]

Gradually building up the Japanese rolling stock here are some latest pictures of the layout.

 

Two D51s haul a long van train past the works, in the background an industrial 0-6-0T shunts goods stock

 

 

A busy scene as two C62s on express trains pass, C11 waits to depart with a local freight and a D51 shunts the yard

 

 

I'll post some more shortly. Photobucket is running really slow tonight and holding me up

 

Kev

Edited April 22, 2017 by kevsmiththai

[kevsmiththai]

Ladle cars and torpedo cars wait loading from the blast furnace. these are 3D printed by Shapeways to a design by stonysmith

 

 

The two D51s are working the yard as a C62 passes on an express. The WAMU 80000 vans certainly bring a  bit of colour to the scene but look better for a bit of weathering. Note the crippled one on the lowloader in the yard waiting to be taken out by road

Kev