Category: History, Mon Valley Miscellany || By

Several Almanac readers are railroad and steel industry buffs, former or current employees of a railroad or mill, or some combination. Today's article is for them.

The rest of you are invited to read along; otherwise, go see what PittGirl is up to.

I noticed the other day that crews from CSX Transportation --- which owns and operates the former Baltimore & Ohio and Pittsburgh & Lake Erie rail lines through Our Fair City --- were replacing tracks on the railroad line that runs past my office, so I ambled over to take a look.

If you've ridden Amtrak lately, you know that the "clickety-clack" sound is almost gone from the railroads. That's because the old splices (railroads call them "fishplates") between pieces of rail have been largely eliminated on mainline tracks. Instead, rails are welded together into long continuous steel ribbons.

Continuous-welded rail is stronger and costs less to maintain, and it provides a smoother ride.

You may think that railroad rails are one-size-fits all, but that's not exactly so. Different size rails are used for different applications. Generally speaking, the heavier the trains, the heavier the rails used to carry them.

Tracks that don't see many trains, or where the trains generally operate with lighter loads and slower speeds, get lighter rail.

The type of rail and manufacturer's name is embossed right into the side of each rail, along with the date of manufacture, so that if a rail breaks, the railroad can identify the company that supplied the faulty product.

The rail at the top of this page, for instance, says "14031 PS CC CARNEGIE USA 1949 ///"

Take "14031 PS." That means that one yard of this rail weighs 140 pounds; "PS" indicates that it's made to a specification published by the Pennsylvania Railroad ("Pennsylvania Special") in 1931. (Not sure what the "CC" means, and searching the Interwebs was no help.)

"CARNEGIE" signifies that the rail was rolled by the Carnegie-Illinois division of U.S. Steel; and according to this webpage, the three "hash marks" mean it was rolled in the third month --- March --- of 1949.

The rail pictured above says "14031 RE USS ILLINOIS 1959 ////////////." It's also 140 pounds per yard, but it follows a specification set by the American Railway Engineering Association and was rolled by U.S. Steel at one of its Carnegie-Illinois plants in December 1959.

I'm not sure why one rail says "Carnegie" and the other "Illinois," but I'm going to guess that the Carnegie rail was rolled in one of the old Carnegie Steel plants --- possibly Braddock or Duquesne? --- while the other was rolled in an old Illinois Steel plant, probably U.S. Steel's South Works in Chicago. (Corrections are welcome.)

Naturally, I wanted to see where the new rail came from.

Ah, Nippon. That's somewhere near Donora, isn't it? No?

As it turns out, there are only two U.S. plants making rails. One, in Oregon, is owned by a Russian company; the other, a former Bethlehem Steel plant in Steelton, is owned by Luxembourg-based ArcelorMittal (which also owns the former Wheeling-Pittsburgh coke plant in Monessen).

Most of the rest of our rail now comes from overseas; in this case, from Japan's Nippon Steel.

Foreign-made steel is nothing new, nor should it surprise anyone that there are so few American steel plants left that most of our rail comes from overseas. If the railroad needs rail, I don't blame them for getting it wherever they can.

But it's amazing that it's cheaper to haul tons of steel across the ocean than to manufacture it right here. And that a product as vital to our economy as rails has to be imported.

And it's worth mentioning that this rail line runs between Carnegie Mellon University and the Carnegie Museums. Considering that Andrew Carnegie's first adult job was working for the Pennsylvania Railroad, I think the old Scot would be pretty appalled.

On the other hand, he'd probably be proud that his mills turned out rails that were so well-made they remained in service more than a half-century later.