Path Valley Lines

[Pennman]

Beautiful layout and nice scenery.
Thanks for sharing,

Rich

[VagelK]

Thank you, Ron & Rich, for your kind words.   Ron, I'm working on new blast furnace complex "build" topics about the blast engine house interior and the pig casting machine expansion project.  But not sure if it belongs here or in another forum area.

[VagelK]

So, here we are at Tascott, the junction and classification yard serving the South Penn Furnace and its subsidiary West Conococheague & Potomac RR. The So. Penn Branch emerges from the tunnel at right, the WC&P comes out of the left tunnel.

The WC&P is a totally fictitious line (meaning no one ever even thought of building a real railroad there, which, in the history of rural Pennsylvania is something quite unusual) that follows its namesake creek to a junction with the Western MD Rwy at Williamsport, MD.  It is a source of raw materials, especially limestone, coming off the Western MD for the blast furnace.  The road names on the hoppers reflect that relationship.



PA Rte 75 roughly parallels the PRR's So. Penn Branch and the B&SGE. In the 1930s it was paved with funds provided by the Federal Works Progress Administration, here reflected by a rather weather-worn billboard -- my Mom, who was a child at the time, said they used to say WPA stood for "We Poke Along."

The furnace company relies on leased PRR power to handle its furnace traffic.  Due to the lack of a satisfactory HO steam Path Valley Lines made do with a Baldwin VO-1000 (BS10 in PennsySpeak), un-prototypically teleported a few years back in time.  But in Summer 2025 the BLI B6sb's finally arrived, and the changing of the guard was duly recorded by our company photographer. That FA-2?  It's the power for one of Path Valley Lines' "time travel" photo specials run for visitors.



This view looks from the PRR's Richmond Furnace facilities back toward the tunnels and yard at Tascott.  The water standpipe to the between the main and passing siding to the left of the tub is a very recent addition and a great relief to the crews of trains coming from Chambersburg, who formerly had to do a double switchback dance with the crew of the furnace shifter to take on water.



The spur from Tascott Yard follows a sweeping curve behind the photographer to reach the coke oven siding, the steep ramp to the furnace's stockhouse, and the long (and equally steep) ramp up to the B&SGE interchange.  No. 44 has turned out to be great hauler and has no trouble on the steep ramps leading to the blast furnace highline and up to the B&SGE interchange, which is pictured in an earlier post.





I'll stop here and conclude next time with a more detailed look at the South Penn Furnace.  Thanks for stopping by, and stay tuned!

[ACL1504]

Vagel,

Very nicely done and the layout looks to have a lot of switching moves available.

Thanks for sharing and I look forward to the next installment.

Tom

[Jerry]

Vagel that is a beautiful layout.  Thanks for sharing with us.

Jerry

[PRR Modeler]

Excellent modeling. I really like the tunnel look.

[cuse]

Great layout all around...I really like the "sculpted" tunnel entrances and the carpeted fascia...I think I first saw that in a Lou Sassi MR project decades ago...looks great.

[VagelK]

I truly appreciate the praise!  A note on the sculpted tunnels:  the rock work was hand-carved using Doug Foscale's (FOS Scale Models) 5-minute technique for working with small-batches of Plaster of Paris mixed to peanut butter consistency, applied and roughed-in with artist trowel and knife, and finished with an Exacto blade as it dries.  I stumbled across his How-To video on the process, tried it, and found it to be a very relaxing way to spend an hour or so making a couple square feet of rock wall that doesn't look like the same five molds were used.  All of the rock surfaces on the layout that aren't shale were made that way.  The concrete portals are built up from 1/2"-thick insulation foam.  By the way, the shale was made by dragging a steel file cleaning brush across foam insulation.

Now I'll move on to the blast furnace complex at Richmond Furnace.  This is my model-in-progress of the South Penn Furnace Company's facility at Richmond Furnace.  It is totally fictitious, although there had been a charcoal iron furnace at the site in the early-19th Century (thus the place name).



Simply put, the blast furnace complex is the raison d'etra for the Path Valley Lines.  It represents a merchant blast furnace, so called because it makes pig iron for sale on the open market through commission agencies in distant business centers.  Merchant Pig Iron was a segment of the American iron & steel industry that is mostly ignored by the "steel mill modelers" of the model railroading world.  And that's not surprising, since it is also largely ignored by industrial historians, as well.  Perhaps that is because it had mostly died out at the onset of the Great Depression, and those few merchant blast furnaces that survived into the 1940s were dismantled during or shortly after World War Two.  I know of one exception, the furnace of Warren (Ohio) Consolidated Industries near Youngstown, which, as a modernized facility, lasted into the early 2000's. 

The South Penn Furnace is based on the historical merchant blast furnace at Riddlesburg, PA, shown below, about sixty airline miles to the west of Path Valley on the Raystown Branch of the Juniata River.  It shared the Raystown Valley with two other such furnaces - the grounds of one of which are now the site of the State Police and Maintenance Facility at Everett, near the Bedford Exit of the PA Turnpike.  All used local iron ore and limestone and were heated with coke made from coal mined on the west side of Broad Top Mountain.  A fourth such operation, the Rockhill Furnaces, did the same on the east side and was served by -- wait for it -- the famous East Broad Top narrow gauge railroad.



Here endeth the lesson ...

The core of the modeled blast furnace is the kit produced by Walthers during the mid-to-late 1990s.  As designed by the late, great Dean Freytag the Walthers blast furnace is part of a comprehensive set of kits called "The Works," and represents a selectively compressed up-to-date plant that would be at home in any integrated iron and steel complex from World War Two through the current era - the USX's Edgar Thompson Works come to mind.  I say selectively compressed, because the stack itself (minus the ducts and other stuff on top) scales out at only 65 feet tall; the real things are 90 feet or more tall.

The photo below is a composite of the Walthers stack as built out of the box (left) and a second one that I back-dated to reflect a typical, up-to-date merchant blast furnace of, say, 1895-1920.  While 65 feet is way too short for a true-to-scale "big time" blast furnace, it is close to perfect for many of the scores of merchant blast furnaces, averaging 70 or so feet tall, that thrived in small towns, like Punxautawney, PA; Johnson City, TN; Buena Vista, VA; and elsewhere throughout Appalachia from the end of the Civil War through World War I.  The one in Johnson City, by the way, was served by another famous 3-ft line, the "Tweetsie."



Anyway ... this one has survived, against all odds, into the late-1930s (the furnace at Riddlesburg lasted 'til 1942).  And, like the one at Riddlesburg, it did so because it modernized with the addition of a pig casting machine - a conveyor of pig molds fed by teeming ladles, which replaced the old method of pouring molten iron directly from the furnace into hundreds hand-made molds in the foundry sand floor of the casting house.  My scratch built pig casting machine occupies the cast house in the panoramic view at top and is a bit closer up in the end-on view, below.  Construction of the pig conveyor involved fabricating I don't know how many individual molds from various sizes and shapes of Evergreen styrene strips, rods, and shapes and ultimately consumed three months of very therapeutic 2-hour daily sessions at the workbench, all diligently recorded for posterity to become the subject of a build topic in the (I hope) not too distant future.



As with a lot of the Path Valley Lines, its design and construction followed an organic process, rather than a blueprint, and, so, there will be some changes at the delivery end in the offing.  These changes will all involve facilitating the dumping of cooled pigs directly into a gondola rather than having to be man-handled from the loading dock to a conveyor as currently is the case.  Duh!

At the other end of the complex sits the blowing house, wherein resides the blast, or blowing, engine that provides the "blast" in Blast Furnace.  A number of years ago at a Steel Mill Modelers meet in Pittsburgh I was fortunate to find a first-gen 3D printed kit for a vertical blowing engine produced by Phillip's Foundry.  After years on the shelf, it finally got put together a year-and-a-half ago and became the core of a detailed interior for the blowing house, the subject of yet another planned build topic.



Other parts of the complex, such as the teeming station end of the pig casting machine and neat details like the "mud gun" (used to plug the tap hole at the furnace base when the flow of molten iron is at an end) will have to wait for the build topic on the pig caster.  The mud gun, by the way, is a wonderful addition to the iron and steel modeling world 3D printed by Yelton Models of Ontario.



And with that, I'll bring this post - and the overall tour of Path Valley Lines - to a close.  I really appreciate all the kind, encouraging words.  See ya soon!

[deemery]

I was wondering about the source of the iron ore for those prototype furnaces.  I found this:  https://ia601402.us.archive.org/32/items/mineralsofpennsy00hick/mineralsofpennsy00hick.pdf  I thought I'd pass it along.

dave

[VagelK]

Thanks very much, Dave.  I will add this to my growing digital antique technical books collection.  Much appreciated!

I was wondering about the source of the iron ore for those prototype furnaces.  I found this:  https://ia601402.us.archive.org/32/items/mineralsofpennsy00hick/mineralsofpennsy00hick.pdf  I thought I'd pass it along.

dave

[Philip]

Great layout and very industrial. How did you do the mail pouch barn stencil? So cool!

[deemery]

Thanks very much, Dave.  I will add this to my growing digital antique technical books collection.  Much appreciated!

I was wondering about the source of the iron ore for those prototype furnaces.  I found this:  https://ia601402.us.archive.org/32/items/mineralsofpennsy00hick/mineralsofpennsy00hick.pdf  I thought I'd pass it along.

dave

It's hard to realize now that Pennsylvania was a major iron ORE producer through most of the 19th century!

dave

[VagelK]

Great layout and very industrial. How did you do the mail pouch barn stencil? So cool!

Thanks.  The Mail Pouch barn is a custom build by Sam Swanson.  I'm not sure how he did the sign; knowing him, he made the decal himself, but it is about the same size as on one of those vintage signs decal sheets.

[deemery]

I remember "Mountaineer Precision Products" did a Mail Pouch barn kit about 20 years ago.  I got it for my brother, we'd see those all over the place in Western PA/WV.

dave

[VagelK]

I remember "Mountaineer Precision Products" did a Mail Pouch barn kit about 20 years ago.  I got it for my brother, we'd see those all over the place in Western PA/WV.

dave

Sam's prototype was a barn outside Morgantown, WV that he drove past on frequent trips to and from WVU in his college days.