No, not drugs. Not even soft drinks

In the September 17, 2017  edition of the podcast The Roundhouse, Bernie Kempinski talked about modeling a steel mill.  He also talked at length about the manufacturing process for steel, including the procedure for making one of the ingredients of steel, coke, a processed form of coal which is a necessary ingredient in the steel-making process.  Bernie dedicates an entire chapter of the book to this, and has some good instructions on how to model one of these facilities. 

Coke facilities are almost as visually interesting and impressive as steel mills, and require significantly less real estate to model well.  And coke facilities generate their own set of by-products which can provide additional variety to model railroad operations.  In manufacturing coke, almost one third of the weight of the coal is burned off as these byproducts, which include many different chemicals (hydrocarbons including coal tar, benzyl, and natural gas; ammonia; and various forms of nitrates/nitrites).  I think that this byproduct facility can easily be modeled using parts from a small petroleum refinery kit (which the byproduct plant essentially is).

Bernie's book mentions a specific coke facility that is now closed but is fairly well documented, partly because it has been declared a National Historic Site.  The Thomas Coke Works of Thomas, Alabama was documented by the Historic American Engineering Record (HAER) in 1992, and was entered into the National Register of Historic Places of the National Park Services in September of 1995.  Much of the facility still exists, and numerous photos can be found in the Library of Congress website as well as other locations.

Note: One needs to be very specific when asking Google about coke processing.  Try it sometime but be advised - probably NSFW.

Rather than trying to find either of Walthers' discontinued coke ovens, I'm going to try to scratch-build the Thomas Coke Works facility.

I've put together a plan that's approximately 2/3 the length of the actual building as N-scale in Scarm, and I'm going to put this on the east (right) end of the layout.  (Aside: It'd be nice if Scarm would allow rotating an object in 3 dimensions.  As it is, I have to simulate a slanted ramp with a large number of small segments.  But it gets the idea across.)

And I have a neat idea regarding the end loops.  Stay tuned.