10/28/2024
Now that the foreground area of my steel mill junkyard is about finished, I'm developing a story line for the oddly empty-looking middle of my model railroad module. You can probably make out what looks like a big concrete slab floor, surrounded by whitish lines that might (with a bit of imagination) be concrete footings. This is the footprint of a building; as the story line goes, this used to be a machine shop, but it has been repurposed. Industrial companies do this all the time. In this case a small outside contractor (who has won the bid to do their work here) can tear down broken or outdated mill equipment, rail cars, etc., and reduce them to scrap that can be sorted and recycled for the Open Hearth department to use as feed stock in steel-making. The scrap building itself will be starting to fall into ruin, but no problem -- on the prototype, a lot of this kind of work was done right out in the weather.
From a modeling standpoint, this will give me a chance not only to design and scratchbuild the facility, but to show HOW the building was originally built, including the framework for the roof girders and walls, an overhead girder crane, and all the litter that would be present in such a spot ... 55 gallon drums, oxygen and acetylene bottles, workbenches, storage racks, etc. This will be fun, and a worthy winter project ... stay tuned!
