How much traffic do I need to support my steel mill

I figure that amongst this vast collection of knowledge is somebody well acquainted what quantities are consumed in the production of steel.

Some background first. The Spokane Southern serves a steel mill in Bessemer, Idaho. The plant was built during WWII to support the war effort and supply steel to the ship building industry on the west coast (this bit of fiction inspired by the Geneva Steel plant in Provo Utah).

The mill only consists of a Walthers steel mill, split in two, giving two blast furnaces on the backdrop. A three track yard sits in front of it, where all inbound and outbound mill traffic will be handled.

I was figuring on one loaded ore train per day (40 cars, but representing a full train of say 12-15 thousand tons. Obviously, there needs to be shipments of coal or coke, alloy ores, consumables, and shipment of finished product.

So my questions are:

I one ore train per day to much or too little to support a dual blast furnace operation?

How much coal or coke needs to be shipped to support the ore making operation?

I was figuring one manifest train / day to handle empties and consumables in, and finished steel and empty cars out.

I would appreciate any help in determining the proper number of trains to support this facility as I design my operating plan. regards, Jerry

Reply to
Jerry Zeman
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I'd probably think that 40 cars a day is a bit high for 3 furnaces. To get an idea of how much is needed, go find out how long a bunch of ore is in a furnace and how much a load for the furnace is. Lets say it takes 6 hours to do a cycle and this means 3 - 4 cycles per day and there is 30 tons of ore in a load. This means that you are running 9-12 loads a day or about

300-400 tons of ore a day. I'd probaly figure about 150 tons of iron a day (I really don't know how much iron comes out of the ore but that number probably isn't going to be far off) that you now have to ship out. Better tho is to go search for ironmaking on Google and read about what is happening in the process and what the input and output numbers are.

-- There are more Democrats on the Calif. Special Election than Republicans! Go count if you don't believe me! Bob May

Reply to
Bob May

This Yahoo group is specifically for the steel industry and the modeling of it. The answers you seek and other information can be found in it.

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Reply to
cloudwilliam

Bob; I had some time at lunch today to research steelmaking production. There was a great wealth of information on the web, but the best I found in terms of the info I needed was at Geneva Steel, which is the mill operation I'm patterning my ficticious mill after.

With two blast furnaces operating, Geneva can produce 2,343,000 tons of steel per year. Their blast furnaces produced 2300 tons per day. They used to ship appx. 1.5M tons of finished product per year. I'm not sure if they are even operating their blast furnaces now that they are in bankruptcy.

Based on the following rations of 1 hot metal ton (pig iron) requiring

1.7 tons of iron bearing material, .5 to .65 tons of coke, and .25 tons of fluxes and trims, and scaling this down at a ration of 4/18 (I'm running 40 ore car trains, GN ran 180 in the 50s), I figure I'll end up with the following operating plan:

(1) 40 car train of ore delivered 4 times per week.

15 cars of coal for conversion to coke, delivered 6 times per week. 11 cars /day of finished material, maybe slightly more, picked up 6 days per week. One car per day delivery of consumables (lubricating oil), alloy materials, or machinery parts.

This will allow me some flexibility in operations. If I'm short operators, I can ignore the mill operations, and run a Sunday schedule. Some sessions the ore won't be delivered. regards, Jerry

Reply to
Jerry Zeman

The proportions look good... but are you sure about the "no Sunday operations"? I was under the impression that the only time a steel plant _wasn't_ active was when there were major repairs underway. From what i recall, taking a day off just isn't economical - you have to keep things hot, so you still have those costs, but you're not making any money.

On the other hand, mebbe this is why your outfit went under...

Reply to
Joe Ellis

Joe: As for "No Sunday Operation", I'm strictly speaking in terms of railroad deliveries. The blast furnace runs continuously, charged with ore deliveries 4 days/week, and coal deliveries six days/week (unless I decide to run unit trains for this service, reducing the number of deliveries).

Can't speak for the future, I'm still in 1952, and the future of the mill is currently bright :-)

Reply to
Jerry Zeman

So even with no deliveries to the mill, you'll still need an industrial switcher working it to shuffle cars in and out.

Hmmm.... Buy IBM!

Reply to
Joe Ellis

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