Ore Bridge

I've been working at the steel mill lately. Last week, I was at the No. 4 Ore Bridge, that services C-6 Blast Furnace. We're working about 100' off the ground. Now, I'm at C-5 Blast Furnace, but I'll be going back to the ore bridge tomorrow. The ore bridge moves along tracks above piles of material, usually taconite pellets. In addition to the east-west movement of the bridge, the trolley moves north-south along tracks up high on the bridge. This allows the bridge operator to gather material from a large area and dump it into hoppers to feed the furnace.
Nice view from up here! In the foreground, the crane is raising a yellow step-ladder for the iron workers. The blue structure in the background is the ore bridge next to the one we're working on. You can also see the mountains of taconite pellets that will be smelted into pig iron in the furnace.
The ore boat unloads material used to make the iron. In this case, it's unloading limestone. The ore bridge then scoops up tons of the material with the clamshell crane, trolleys to the furnace, and drops the material in hoppers to be raised to the top of the furnace and dropped in. You may recognize this ore boat from a previous post when Peeps and I were working on the bridge lighting.

Here, Peeps, and Hardy Har Har, are under the trolley feeding the old motor cables to me. They're about 80' up in the air in a lift.