Experiments and simulations are conducted to explore the changing laws of blast furnace raceway morphology and pressure drop with cylindrical particles. Experimental data show that there are five typical stages for the pressure drop during the raceway formation. The closer the aspect ratio (Ar) of particle to 1, the bigger the raceway size and the wider the particle moving band will be. When the raceway is in stable stage, the pressure drop can be ascribed to the cooperative action of the bed height, inlet gas velocity and Ar. Numerical results reveal that the large raceway formation for sphere-like particle is due to the small drag and contact forces. The contact forces in the prolate particle system are very large and thus result in a small raceway. Finally, the influence of particle shape is employed to improve a raceway size predictive correlation which can increase the average calculational accuracy by 3.4%.