I've mostly completed another building for the steel mill complex. From afar, to the untrained eye, steel mills look like an amazingly complex jumble of similarly-colored buildings. As you learn more about the process you start to identify which ones are which. So far I have a blast furnace, a rolling mill, and some coke ovens in the background. I had a space in there that needed something, and I wasn't too picky about what function it served. It just needed to look the part. Walthers offers a blower house, which blows superheated air into the blast furnaces to feed the processes there. Based on the layout of things, it was going to be tough to fit that in there. Steel mills also can have power houses. I found the Walthers Metro Power and Light kit was a good fit in terms of style. I needed to narrow it by 1.5 inches to get it to fit the space. I painted it the same flat gray as the other buildings. Details aren't a big concern with this building - it's in back, it just needs to fill a space and look the part.
The kit comes with a large smokestack and another outer building that connects to that. I haven't built those yet, I may not need them. If it's a blower house, then I need to find some styrene tubes to connect to the blast furnace. The challenge is going to be, in the absence of being able to get these in person, to find the right sized ones online.
Lessons learned:
1. Squadron brand putty - after a few years, it's nearly impossible to get out of the tube. I used some in the corners where I had to narrow the building. It doesn't look neat but it's better than seeing a gap, and the paint sorta covers it.
2. It's easy to cut things straight when you're working with a corrugated surface, since there's already half a groove to work with.
Next up: finishing some things, starting others. I need guard rails for the highway, as well as more Jersey barriers; I need to figure out ballasting the passing tracks and sidings and how to cover the steel mill area; I need to paint the rails near the grain milling complex; figure out a photo backdrop for the river scene; as well as the a fore-mentioned piping from the new building to the blast furnace.
