Hi,
The quantity of iron ore needed depends upon the iron concentration in the ore. The data given by JohnnyC1 are supposedly for high grade e.g. scandinavian ores fed into a modern blast furnace. Such ores are transported by ocean going ships all over the world. There were, however, blast furnaces built and designed to make use of low grade local ores.
A hundred years ago, these blast furnaces were much less fuel efficient, needing up to four tons of coke for each ton of raw iron.
As far as I know, it was general practice up to the middle of the 19. century to remelt scrap iron in blast furnaces. The invention of the Bessemer converter and the Siemens-Martin-converter, which generated internal temperatures of about 1600 C thus allowing to remelt scrap steel directly stopped that practice.
Nowadays, blast furnaces only serve to reduce the iron oxide contained in iron ore to elementary molten raw iron. This raw iron contains more than 4% carbon. It may be cast in molds to make either iron pigs or all kinds of cast iron objects ranging from frying pans to iron pillars designed to support train sheds.
To convert raw iron into steel, the amount of carbon has to be reduced to less than 2%. Nowadays this is done in a converter by blowing pure oxygen onto the molten iron. In the process the carbon burns off quickly, generating a lot of heat. To prevent the converter from overheating a certain amount of scrap iron or steel must be added, which melts in the process using the excess heat and thus cooling the content of the converter.
If you want to build an iron mill in trainz you will have to consider at what time period it is supposed to work. Up to the middle of the 20th century all internal transports of iron ore, lime, coke, molten raw iron and molten slag were done by trains, involving spectacular light and steam effects.
Nowadays much of that is done by conveyor belts or in completely closed systems, which do not show much in terms of action.
I have attemped to build blast furnaces, coke ovens and converter plants for ts04. The problem was, that to simulate operation of a steel mill properly, multiple users are needed, as there are many trains which have to be shunted simultaneously. We could not do that by AI, and doing things by animated meshes became boring after a while, as well as quite complicated and needing a lot of scripting too.
The multiple user facilty available since ts 2012 might provide the proper solution for that. The new options for content creation are very attractive too, but would require an awful amout of time to implement.
Cheers,
Konni
