I’ve always read about Birmingham, Alabama being a big steel town, and by extention, a busy railroad town. I can understand how the big steel mills ended up on the great lakes, where transportation was convenient for iron ore and coal. The northeast also had the population and industry to use the steel.
How did Birmingham become a steel center? Is/was there iron ore and coal nearby? Is steel still a big thing there?
Yes, Iron Ore was available from mines in Red Mountain just west of Birmingham, and there is coal still mined in Northern Alabama. Not many locations in the US had both Iron and coal nearby, Birmingham was one of them. As the Iron Ore deposits in the Birmingham area played out near the end of WW2, US Steel supplied the mill with Ore from new mines in Venezuela which was transported by barge mainly from Mobile up the river. More recently BNSF has been moving Taconite Pellets from US Steel’s Keewatin Taconite in Keewatin, MN to Birmingham in an all-rail move. The BNSF symbol for this move is U-SEMBIR
USS Fairfield Works is still active. Sloss Furnaces is still standing and is now a national historical site. The Railroad District next to Sloss is still a great place to watch trains to this day.Ensley’s steel mill is gone completely except for the smoke stacks. I kick myself to this day for not getting more pictures around Birmingham while I could.
George
Since I know your a race fan Murphy, here’s a side note. Slag from the Birmingham mills was used in the construction of Talladega Superspeedway. Under the asphalt I would assume. And the California Speedway at Fontana was built on the site of a closed mill complex. That’s how they were able to build a racetrack in California. The neighbors prefered it to a closed, contaminated industrial site. There is still a small BNSF yard on site, and special passenger trains are run out from LA during the NASCAR races.
That sounds like California. Replace thousand of jobs earning a minimum of $25.00 an hour to a race track where you can burn more gasoline you won’t allow to be processed in your state and pay money to watch. By the way, The site was last called California Steel and prior to that was the Kaiser Steel company. The iron ore came from Utah in unit trains I believe. By the time I called on it as California Steel the blast furnaces were shut down and they only processed steel they didn’t melt any. Not the best place in the world to be when earthquakes rumbled through. Never saw huge mill stands jumping up and down before or since. Wonder if those NASCAR boys have ever been on the track during an earthquake. Driver, “My steering seems to have a problem”. Pit, “Yeah we know what the problem is. It’ll clear up in a couple of seconds. trust me.”.
Slag is a fairly common construction material in steel producing parts of the country. It’s used both as aggregate (gravel) and as a component in Bituminous concrete (hot mix asphalt paving material). There are a number of materials firms in places such as Michigan and the Pittsburgh area that specialize in reprocessing slag for these applications…
Reprocessing slag? I thought slag was just the junk material that got skimmed off the top of the molten iron or steel. Other than break it up into smaller chunks(?), what would reprocessing involve?
California Steel Industries is still operating. There operate what were the finishing mills in the Kaiser Steel mill. Oregon Steel Mills used to have a plate mill there. I am still trying to find photographs of the plant when Kaiser operated it.
Kaiser Steel went bankrupt and shut down many years before the speedway was put in. Unfortunately, all integrated steels west of the Mississippi River are closed (there were only three).
There is one mini-mill (melts scrap steel) in California. It is Tamco Steel in Rancho Cucamonga, next to Fontana. Rancho Cucamonga’s class A baseball team is called the Quakes.
Well there are two types of slag at an integrated steel mill. You are right that in the processing of steel there is just a little slag that is poured off or skimmed off. That is beacuse the vast bulk of impurities are removed in the blast furnace in the making of iron. This furnaces have two vast pits that are typically side by side and about 100 yards long and maybe 100 to 150 feet wide. When the furnace is tapped to drain the iron a second tap is made on the backside and the slag is drained off into one of the pits. Usually there is twice as much slag genereated as iron.That is beacuse of the breakdown of the ore opr pellets being used. One pit is filled while a front end loader digs out the other pit. This takes a week or more in most cases. The slag is hauled by off road dump trucks to a crusher and sorter. After processing it is a gray porpus rock that looks something like a natural sponge in texture. It can be had from gravel though about baseball size. It is very hard and compacts well. It is very stable and is used for underlayment for driveways or roads as the primary usage. You would not want to drive on the large stuff very long with auto tires as it would cut them up rather quickly in the larger sizes
??? Colorado moved to EAST of the Mississippi when I wasn’t looking?
[(-D] [(-D]
Didn’t you hear? Due to all the flooding this year, we had “Move the River to the Left Day” last month!
In a bit of irony (sorry), beams from Alabama are being shipped by rail to Baltimore, and are being off-loaded onto flatbeds to be used on 95 bridges around DC…all this within sight of the Sparrows Point plant.
I thought there was a still mill in Pueblo(?) still… Is the ore and coal all shipped in for that one as well?
One little geographical correction–Red Mountain is southeast of Birmingham. I am thankful that I did not have to navigate in the southeast part of Birmingham, because you just about need GPS (which did not exist when I lived in the area). Birmingham North, Birmingham West, and Ensley are comparatively easy to navigate in, for you have numbered streets running from southeast to northwest and numbered (lettered in Ensley) avenues running from southwest to northeast in the older parts. Birmingham South and Southwest are not bad until you start going up and over the mountain–then be careful!
Rocky Mountain Steel is no longer an integrated steel mill. The blast furnaces, coke ovens, etc closed in the early or mid 1980s, it was Colorado Fuel & Iron back then. It is now a mini-mill.
Also, I forgot to include in my first post, Kaiser mined iron ore at Eagle Mountain, near the Salton Sea, in California. They even had four U30Cs to haul the iron ore trains to the SP interchange. I seem to recall hearing that for a few years after the mill shutdown they exported some of the iron ore.