The coke oven kit was the first kit in the Walthers H0 steel mill series, and it is probably the most disappointing. In operation, the coke ovens had three different mobile units that were used to operate the facility. One, a charging larry, operated on the top of the ovens, taking the raw materials for coke production from the tower at one end of the facility and transporting them to the individual coking oven. Another unit, the pusher, pushed the coke from the ovens into a quenching car. From there, the hot coke was taken down to the quenching tower, sprayed with water to cool it, then returned and dumped into a hopper for loading into storage silos for ultimate loading into railroad coke cars. The Walthers kit only includes the coke ovens and processing facilities, and to do this kit justice, you will need to fabricate the various cars that operated the facility. (This kit has since been retooled, but the add-on mobile units are still not included)

Here, the coke ovens have been built end-to-end because of the narrow shelf available:

Coal is unloaded at the left, raised by conveyor to the first tower, which then crushes the coal for processing. The crushed coal is then raised by conveyor again to the second tower, which stores the coal until is is ready to be “charged” into the ovens.

The coke ovens themselves are in the center of this picture. The dark gray panels are the doors of the coke battery, in this case, 18 individual ovens. There needs to be a coke pusher on this side of the ovens, to push the coal out the far side of the ovens. On the back side, a door car is needed to open the individual doors of the battery, along with a quenching car which carries the heated coke to the quencher (right). The coking process creates heated gasses, which are collected and fed into a manifold, the large (light brown) pipe that runs the length of the ovens. In practice, this pipe would continue on to a storage tank, then fed into a separate facility for further processing.

Page last updated 8/29/2006

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