I’ve always read, that stick rail was 39’ long, so it could be hauled in a standard 40’ boxcar. Is that true? If so, how did they get it in and out of the boxcars?
I don’t know about a boxcar (unless it’s one of the rare end-door ones), but I thought such rail would most likely go by (40ft interior length) Gondolas or Flat Cars - just lift the rail segments off.
Also I remember reading some other rail ‘urban legend’ that the 39ft size was due to limitations on the early rail-rolling processes, and it became a ‘standard’ from then on…
I have only seen rail transported in gondolas and flat cars. Regardles of the length of the rail it would be impossible to get a 39 foot rail through the normal 10 foot wide side door opening of a 40 foot box car.
Freight cars have continually evolved over the years - getting bigger and having increased capacity.
With 39 ft. rail the rolling mill needs 39ft of space on each side of the shaping rollers to allow the rail blank to pass back and forth until it is finished. The new standard is 78 ft. It takes more than one pass through the rollers to reduce the steel blank to the correct size and shape. So the piece of steel repeatedly moves back and forth with the shaping rollers being tighten with each pass.
Yes, the stick rail was 39 ft. long so it could fit inside and pretty much fill up a 40 ft. long (interior) car, and still have a couple inches left over at each end for space to be able to lift out the rails without snagging on the car ends.
No, it was not to fit in boxcars, but to fit in common 40 ft. gondola cars. Flats - having no ends - are less restrictive.
With regard to the mills, the length of rails was (and is) a “Which comes first - the chicken or the egg ?” kind of a situation. With the railroads wanting 39 ft. lengths - back in the day, before continuous welded rail was common and became the new standard - that’s how the mills were designed and built - to accomodate that length. For the processes described above, the mill arrangement was pretty inflexible once built - a lot of big machines, precisely aligned and set in concrete, in very long buildings, etc. Once that occurred, it was considerably more difficult and expensive to roll any rails longer than 39 ft. with that set-up, so that’s what became the limiting factor - and no railroad buyer or steel mill wanted to pay to tear it all out and build new just for a few longer lengths. But in the last few decades, with CWR almost universal and longer rails meaning fewer expensive welds - and longer gons and flats routinely available - the railroads started wanting longer rails. So as each rail mill was built or rebuilt since the mid-1980’s (Wheeling-Pittsburgh at Monessen comes to my feeble memory as the 1st), the longer rail capability was built-in as the current standard. And that’s how we gradually evolved to where we are today.
- Paul North.
Paul: I thought that a few new mills roll rail to CWR lenghts and it then goes directly onto rail trains. Any truth?
Gondolas and flatcars makes better sense. Anybody have thought about why 40’ became a standard for car lenght way back then?
I’m just guessing here, but my guess is “because…”
Maybe Roman wagons were 40 feet long?[:)]
I seem to recall, that around the turn of the last century, (19th-20th) the standard car size was 36 foot for most freight cars and 60 foot for passenger…I don’t have any verifiable facts that prove that however.
No, no truth to that, so far as I know. It isn’t practical or economic to make the rolling line long enough to accomodate anything like the typical 1,440 ft. long CWR string as a single piece of rail. The need to make multiple passes through the roller stands - to precisely form the rails to the correct dimensions as mentioned above - is still there. As a result, the roller line has to be at least twice as long as the maximum rail length - and then some. If you’ve ever seen it done, because the rails are moving quickly through the rollers for fast = maximum production and that mass doesn’t stop quickly, some added distance for acceleration and deceleration is also needed, so upwards of 3,000 linear ft. of roller equipment would be needed, but most of that would only be supporting and moving the rails, not shaping it. The roller equipment is precise, big and takes up a lot of expensive space, expensive, uses a lot of power and skill to operate, maintenance, etc., so there are a lot of reasons not to use any more of it than absolutely necessary.
Instead, what the mills do is roll the rails to whatever length they are best set-up for - as an example, the Steelton, PA mill (former Bethlehem Steel Co., on the southern side of Harrisburg, PA) rolls up to 82 ft., I believe. Then, a CWR welding plant is set-up basically right at or near the mill - at Steelton, when it was ConRail’s the weld shop was a few miles away, on the northern side of Harrisburg, at a place called Lucknow (just southeast of the east end of the long Rockville stone arch bridge). That’s where the rail is welded in CWR and loaded onto the rail trains. I understand that all of the other rail mills have similar post-rolling CWR sh
I am but a humble track guy, not a rolling stock expert, so I can’t respond to the specific question. However, in one of my postings above I was going to point out that before 39 ft. became the standard rail length - early in the 20th century sometime (exact date not known to me at the moment) - it was 33 ft. But then I thought, “That’ll only muddy the waters here and clutter up the explanation” - so I left that out. However, now that question has been raised (however obliquely), 33 ft. as a standard rail length would likewise make more sense for a car shorter than 40 ft. - 36 ft. would work, but so would 35 or 34 ft. and still provide enough space for the rails to not snag on the car ends while being lifted out. So while I’m not sure of the pertinent car length dimension - someone else who has that knowledge, kindly supply it, please - that seems plausible.
- Paul North.
I had always heard that a 39ft piece of rail was the length that could be made out of a ingot of a certain weight. I’m not sure what that weight would be. Maybe later as railsize increased, they kept this length as the standard.
40’ cars were the new standard that replaced 30’ cars. When the cars were 30’, rail came in 29’ sticks.
The big factor the limits the lenght of a rolled rail is how much twist is introduced during the rolling. If you can control the twist, you can roll longer lengths.
Paul, RWM, Mudchicken: This brings up a question. Since several steel mills are or will be banked will there be extra MILLING CAPACITY for the proposed infrastructure improvements? Also how has the price of the various grades of rail changed from 2008?
When they tear up the Zephyr tracks behind my house I hope I can get (legally) a short section of rail for a memento. I’m hoping there are some short section on that 5.9 mile track.
No, each ingot of X tons could produce several - way more than 1 - rails of Y section (wt. in lbs. / yd.) of Z length. I forget the range - somewhere I have a table that shows approx. how many rails & lengths could be produced from 1 mill’s standard size ingot, and ingot sizes were not too standardized between mills or even with a mill. My memory is telling me between 6 and 10 ea. 39 ft. rails, but my logic and math is saying that number’s too small. So just fto work out an example, a 20-ton ingot (a size that could be hauled by a highway truck) = 40,000 lbs. divided by 132 lbs. / yd. rail section = 303 yds. of rail divided by 13 yards for ea. 39 ft. long “stick” of rail = 23.3 rails, which seems closer to typical. Such an ingot would be on the smaller size - 40,000 lbs. divided by 490 lbs. per cubic foot density of steel = 81.6 cubic feet. A ingot of that volume could be (in vertical position) approx. 10 ft. high x 4 ft. wide x 2 ft. thick, or equivalent and I’ve seen many that were much larger than that - like double that size.
Even if the intent was that the rail length was selected to obtain an even (integer) number of rails from an ingot with no waste, it just didn’t work out that way, for a number of reasons. First, the ingot size and pouring volume wasn’t controlled that closely - even a small variation would add or subtract a portion of a rail length. Second, note the decimal portion of the “23.3 rails” above - almost always a fractional rail would result anyway. Thirdly, the steel mill always figured on producing a percentage of “shorts” = shorter rails from the rolling process anyway. As a result, the standard specificati