Guru’s
What is the meaning of the hash marks on these rails?
http://www.railpictures.net/images/d1/1/6/1/6161.1346320543.jpg
Thanks
Robert
They are following the year the rail was made and each hash mark represents one month.
Thank you!!
Brother DC - Just wait till he discovers what heat numbers are…[swg]
OK - I will bite - gently - what are the heat numbers?
I haven’t really figured out the hash marks yet.
Near rail has 12 hash marks = December
Far rail has 6 has marks = June
Your turn now Muddy friend, I took the easy one.
I notice that this 136 lb rail made in 1979 is now on secondary track, or perhaps a siding, so it has probably been cascaded once or twice. My muddy friend can also explain “cascading” as I am too busy, ha!
Well an ah ha on the hash marks. But doubt the rest of the explanation from fuzzy will be quite as straight forward. [:S]
If anyone would like to hear my explanation of cascading, I hope they’ll relay that to me…
It’s been quite a while since I read anything about the making of steel, but I do know that the numbering of heats has to do with the manufacture of steel (if you had such a high temperature in your kitchen, your house would probably burn down).[:)]
[+o(] [ OK, “groan” . . . ] . . . “relay”, huh ?!?
The caption on the photo says this track is in Colorado, the former MP line to Pueblo, which they started to tear up this summer.
Not torn up, still very much there. (Does have an STB discontinuance of service [mothballed] on it from NA Jcn, to Haswell since earlier this month. The shady outfit in Utah is trying to stay under the radar until they can yank it. Most of the line is 119# CWR.) Haswell to Towner is still in service.
Mooks: Heat numbesr are the indented numbers, on the opposite side of the rail from the raised brand, are the pedigree and serial numbers for the rail. They tell you things much like a car VIN number does, where in the bloom/ingot the steel came from, top or bottom of the bloom, manufacturing options, etc… DC, PDN, Steve14 and I all used to have to keep track, by hand carried notes in books (before computers), of the rail heat numbers and where they were in track for purposes of looking for trends in rail and manufacturing defects.
Although it does not happen all the time, when the detector car orders out a rail or the section gang replaces a broken rail, somebody ought to be noting the heat number in the rail changeout paperwork. In more recent history (1990), this partially is what SP used to discover what a mill defect was that plagued them with new Bethlehem rail on Tehachapi Pass…
(and if I brought back some painful memories for diningcar of terminal boredom and long painful days of mind numbing book-keeping, I apologize.)
Eugene Lewis (author of 10,000 Days On The Northwestern Line) relates a similar tale from his time on the CNW about books with the heat numbers of the rails. If a rail was found defective, a few more rails with the same or similar heat numbers would get changed out as well.
He also relates somebody (office cleaning staff, maybe) ended up throwing some of those books out…
Sir C! I understood every bit of that the first read thru! [bow]
Details of railroading that most of us would never even think of, let alone look for marks! Simple genius in railroading, again.
on those heat numbers, you will typically (but not always) see them like this:
X 123456 12 AB
X= top rail order out of the ingot with “A” being the first rail, usually going from about A to R (most railroads will automatically reject the A rail as it is more likely to have defects or air pocket occlusions in the rail
123456 = Ingot number (numbered in the order cast) and rail letter number
12 = Strand or Bloom number in conseutive order
AB Method of hydrogen elimination/ treatment code
Thanks muddy friend. Now all of our hobbiest colleagues will have no problem educating their newby’s.
[:-,] Wonder if any of the model railroad-type hobbyists ever tried to more faithfully emulate the prototype by embossing the rail section ‘brands’ as shown in the photo in the Original Post, and/ or engraving the heat numbers on the inside of the webs of their rails . . . ? [swg] Makes as much sense as some of the rivet detail and paint scheme obsessions, if you ask me !
- Paul North.
May have created a monster - Have visions of people running around on hands and knees looking under the mill scale for heat numbers or calling the railroads that some of their heat numbers are missing (they got rooked and bought counterfeit rail?).