The intertwined history of the technological development of the steel industry and the creation of viable railroads is losing an important milemarker. A sad epitaph that in some way seems timely as manufacturing in many examples seems to have caught the last southbound train never to return. Bethlehem Steel for many in my generation was the visible muscle in the strong independant commerce of another generation…
A good deal of the plant was gone already. I think the hulks of the blast furnaces will remain though as part of an industry museam. Governor Ed’s gambling cronies are setting up shop on that land.
…It’s sad to read of mammoth Bethlehem Steel structures being demolished to be gone forever.
Being originally from near the Johnstown area and old enough to have seen all that complex under full production with all the sounds and smoke and railroad action around the grounds…and so on…It’s sad to understand what it once was and what it is not now…Hard to accept. At one time, it was America at work…and during the war years it did it’s part to ensure we would have the material to win the fight…Which of course we did.
The Johnstown complex is mostly silent now…Still lots of it standing to remind us that lived in that era what was once done there…Proudly done…
While the steel industry in the vibrancy of full production was never any beauty queen, in death with shut down facilities it has the appearance of doom on earth…returning to to the rust from which it originally rose. Having passed the rusting facilities around Steelton, Youngstown, Warren and Pittsburgh it is hard to imagine the nighttime light shows those mills produced as one passed them during their heyday.
By the same token, driving through Akron and not smelling the making of rubber tires is a sad commentary on the state of industrial America.
The overarching tragedy of all this is the lost job opportunities, marked by the diappearing middle class in this country.
rji2: You hit it exactly right…Jobs…!! In the city of Johnstown, Pa. with the mills going full blast I see visions in my memory of hundreds of workers at shift time downtown in the city, as the mills were just at the edge of the business district…Workers arriving downtown via streetcar to head into the mills for their shift, etc…Just bustling with busyness…Middle class workers making good money…buying products…{most at that time, made in USA}…
One could see the light in the sky from the blast furnaces at night from 20 some miles distant. No the mills were not pretty…far from it, but they sure were producing wages for our workers. Powerful times for American workers. Much of it dormant, silent now, rusting away…Some one in a 3rd world country {that we no doubt help set up}, doing something similar to produce steel now and then their government “dumping” it back into our country at prices no one here can compete…
WOW another steel furnace gone .
AK Steels (Armco) Ashland ,Ky site appears to be tearing down one of their two furnaces.
I’m sure it’s the Amanda furnace.This use to be called The American Rolling Company I think.I’ve had family work and retire at this site. Here’s a link to see the Armco site in Ashland. http://www.coalcampusa.com/rustbelt/ky/ky.htm
If we ever have to produce steel to fight I fear that we will not have the ability to meet our needs.
Ive gone into steel mills to get coil out and they are of good quality if not the best. To have foreign steel come into the USA really hurts us as a Nation although it might be cheaper to use.
I remember the facility in Sparrows. It was not much when we traveled it to learn driving big rigs 20 years ago and is probably even less if at all now.
G’day, Y’all,
There won’t be anyone to turn the metal into war machines, either. Machining is a dying technology here.
At the company I work for, they told us that there isn’t a machinist in the USA who can turn out quality gears. It got cheaper to get them overseas and so in one generation, that knowledge was lost in the USA.
Bethlehem Steel made the ship my father was on in WW II, the Wasp, CV-18. He was assignment officer for VF-81.
Up here in far upstate NYSSR, the same thing happened almost twenty years ago when the Lackawanna complex demolition began. It took more than a decade to tear it all down, and over the next decade, buildings not torn down and about 25% of the land have been re-developed, or remain in use by new owners. However the progress overall is very slow, not helped by the over regulation and ruinous taxation imposed upon businesses here. The buildings and their facilities tend to change owners every few years or so, as businesses are bought out by other companies or are spun off by their owners. This site draws lots of speculation, now and then, but no real action on a serious redevelopment effort seems likely.
…I really don’t know how it may effect our country in the future…That is, destroying all our steel making facilities…or not modernizing such to a point they can’t even try to keep up with competitors in the world.
It looks a bit scary to me but everything is changing so much from the processes just in the late 20th century…I really don’t know what to think about it all. And machinists…That’s another aspect of it all. Much of our machined products coming from overseas…??
Let’s not romanticize the steel industry. In the age of open hearth furnaces, it was a dirty, smelly and dangerous operation. The industry today is cleaner, more profitable, more productive and much more efficient than it has ever been. As a native of Western PA, I can recall when the night sky glowed red over Duquesne and Braddock as steel was being made in the Mon Valley. Now the only active Blast Furnaces in all of Pennsylvania are at U.S. Steel’s Edgar Thomson Works in Braddock, where USS uses the furnaces, the basic oxygen process (BOP), and a Dual-strand continuous slab caster to produce slab steel for the nearby Irvin Works.
http://www.railpictures.net/viewphoto.php?id=35456
The slabs are delivered by the Union Rail Road,
http://www.railpictures.net/viewphoto.php?id=108163
which, by the way, is one of the most photogenic shortlines in the eastern U.S.
Also, in an age of ICBMs and B-2 Bombers, the U.S. is not likely to fight another two ocean World War which required huge quantities of steel for tanks, battleships and ammunition.
We can justifiably lament the loss of jobs and the decline of steel-making communities that transpired when Big Steel disappeared from much of Rust-Belt America, but it was inevitable that most of the large, vertically-integrated manufacturers would become industrial dinosaurs as the economics favored lower-cost, i.e., nonunion, mini-mills and foreign producers and as the technology evolved.
In southwestern PA, there have been tangible economic and environmental benefits to the disappearance of heavy industry. The air and water are cleaner and we now have access to the riverfronts, where these brownfields have been and are being reclaimed by public and private monies.
…I for one am not trying to romanticize any steel industry.
It’s just one piece of the economic pie in this country that is disappearing…Sometime in the future we’ll extract enough of our economy that all of a sudden we’ll look around and wonder who has any sufficient employment left for the population to earn a sustaining level of living…Who will be the ones that can afford to buy {any}, products…or something like that…
We, as a country will face the danger of depending on {others}, to make what we need in everyday life…
I’m a native of western Pennsylvania too…and to see industry dying everywhere one travels in that area is not too encouraging. Everyone can’t be employed by retail stores…We still need some kinds of industry that “makes things”…adds value, to bring money to the area for our population. [2c]
Long ago and far away, I worked part time in a machine works, one of many stationed at row upon row of engine and turret lathes admidst the smell of cooling oil being burnt, the smoke wafting up to the dirty skylights, the oil soaked clothes, the carts of raw material, lined up, the micrometers, steel toed shoes and coke bottle safety glasses as part of our “uniform…” I worked alongside old timers and it slowly seeped into me the pride and self assurance that what we did everyday in producing a tangible product was important, not to anyone else in particular, but to us…I have never forgotten their faces…I happened by the site of that bustling activity in my memory and found a boarded up shell long ago stripped of any useful remains. As I peered inside…I could still see the ghosts of John with his bag lunch eating at his lathe while the metal shavings peeled away and Abe with his failing eyesight, taking off his own thick glasses to wipe them with the ever present industrial towel in his pocket…after that brief encounter with my past…I stopped at a Walmart to pick up some forgotten items on a list my wife had given me…I was greeted by a dignified gentleman my own age with silver hair reading his mental cue card of greeting.our eyes met…and we were both somehow embarrassed…and thought of that vanished place and time…how we all live in a nominal republic with economics and oliarchy as the actual reality behind the romantic notions we cherish…myself, I have no use for politics…but I find it inescapable to not rue the passing of “honest work” forgotten, steadfast middle class craftsmen banished to becoming greeters at a emporium for foreign made goods. Goodbye Bethlehem Steel…a brave new world indeed.
When all the steel plants are gone,and we have to buy steel from China,Russia,and…oh wait we already are.Maybe that’s what the problem is ?
If this all takes place and we have to build more bombs to wage war,then who will supply our steel if all of our former enemies are making it now ?You betcha,a war lost without shooting a single bullet because we have no bullet to shoot !
It’s a shame to think or at least are brainwashed into thinking we don’t need all this “dirty industry”.Service type jobs only won’t support an economy.
What do you think the railroads that we all like to railfan have thrived on for years ?Industry thats disappearing.
When all the Federal judges keep the mines from mining,what coal drags are you gonna be watching.Those on video or on your model layout.
The rails depend on these industies for business.And I have 16 years in and 22 to collect a r.r. retirement.So save our steel plants and coal mines and other plants.
Heck I want to retire and watch trains from the ground for a change [:D] .
Coming of age a long time ago meant that by individual disposition, you either went on to college or you went to work upon graduation in manufacturing, etc. There were opportunities on both sides of the fence, the common denominator was that if you applied yourself, kept your nose to the grindstone, you could work your way up, especially in what became known as blue collar jobs. There was pride, there were lines of lunch buckets held by guys waiting to check in at the security gate or the time clock…Some wag recently coined a phrase that stuck with me which is workless work. The idea that you have to have a college degree, you go right from school into a managerial job, sit at a computer and instead of handling real world materials, you organize and process information, sitting at a desk all day long. Maybe thats why we are a nation of overweight folks. I keep being reminded of kids coming up now and that other side of the fence is now largely “service industry” jobs in retail…where do these kids go? I have no ax to grind about the miltary services, but this seems to have become a defacto career for kids a generation ago would be working in a steel mill. One observation I have been dismayed by is the creation in this country of a class sytem similar to that which flourished in victorian england…a ruling class and a servant class. You either make money by controlling the economy or serve those that do. If you play this out to it’s natural conclusion its pretty disquieting. Another aspect of this is our nominally republican form of government where the oliarchys involved seem to have lost their previously intentional low profile. The hard boiled cynics from dime novels used to say the country ran on three groups, the cops, the politicians and the big money…when I strip away all of my sentimental romantic notions, thats what I am left with…I have become a cynic of sorts, and in this there is a tendency to paint everything with a broad brush, maybe it has to do with aging and learning by expe
A can of worms here Wally. Give me a bit of time to ponder my answer to that.
I dont have any answers to my own observations.
Wally you really did answer it.
In other words the old folks were right.The rich get richer,and the poor get more poor.
It’s amazing how this great country of ours went from the industrial gaint of the world to what it is today.An assembly line [sigh].
I bet you see Americas railraods being continental in North America in the next few years.I know they alredy have their feet in Mexico,and the Canadian r.r.'s have theirs in the US.But along with the upcoming North American Union in the near future,wait and see what I’m talking about.
I’ve already wrote my congressman on this “North American Union” deal.He wouldn’t entirely say it won’t happen,but he wouldn’t deny that the three countries Mexico,America and Canada haven’t talked about it.The companies of these countries will make it happen.
We ship parts made in Canada and the US to Mexico to build a car.We ship the car to the US or Canada to sell.We do the exact same process with Canada.This country has lost it’s vast production type industry and have become the middle man in business.
That will keep Americas railroads going.But for how long ?
Already the autoparts boxcars have slowed down.Intermodal to Mexico,both ways have increased.And yet we are shipping still,alot of cars.
Oh this all gives me a headache [V] !
You bring up an interesting perspective which if you consider rail lines as root systems of the tree of commerce, the Canadian lines are spreading South as the U.S lines reach South into Mexico. It is undeniable that South America represents a huge storehouse of natural resources from the mines in Patagonia to oil to forestry products, etc. One interesting question: If you loaded a train full of products how far South could you ship them by rail? One question leads to another…is a rail link between South America and ourselves an eventuality or desirable? I have heard this theory as well as far as a movement to balkanize countries into a worldwide economic web tied by common currencies, etc.