Photographs of Kaiser exist – like most industrial projects of that time the construction of the mill was extensively photographed – but are not in any on-line collection such as memory.loc.gov to my knowledge. There’s a book just out http://www.sbsun.com/columnists/ci_4227651 that has photos of Kaiser Steel – this is one of the Arcadia series that are useful but are diminished by extremely poor reproduction quality. There were several very good articles in Blast Furnace & Steel Plant magazine in the 1950s, including a 40-or-so-page complete description of the mill including excellent photographs. That journal can be found at some university libraries.
Only someone with a contact at the J can tell you the destinatons of those coal trains but I have sat in Inland Steel on many occasions when 100 car trains would block the entire mill up. Steel mills will stockpile coal if they think there will be an interruption in delivery like a rr or coal mine strike. There could also be a power plant or two getting deliveries in the area. There are also a couple of rail to water transfer operations in the Chicago area that ship coal by barge to Lake Michigan power plants. All the power plant coal operations cease with winter for the most part and they definitely stockpile the coal.
…Do we have no one with any knowledge of how massive the Johnstown, Pa. steel complex really was {In numbers}…No one from out east…? By the way it {the mills}, were served by the C&BL RR within the complex and the B&O and Pennsylvania were present right at the sight. Main line of the Pennsylvania passed right through it all and the S&C branch of the B&O came right to the sight via Somerset and north from Rockwood {on the B&O main line}.
There’s a couple of buildings still standing on the former Geneva Steel site. How much longer they’ll be there, I don’t know. Meanwhile, there’s several businesses along the east side of the Geneva Steel property that are still functioning: Air Liquide, Geneva Nitrogen, and some other unknown business. As a bonus, some of the surviving steel mill switchers (SW7 or SW9, and a few Baldwin S12s), see occasional use moving cars around on the remaining steel mill trackage.
Thanks for the excellent explanations. nd, you did a great job of explaining it in “Coke for Dummies” terms.
I think the 412 is a coke train and the 882/884 are coal trains which come out of West Virginia. They ran an 882 this morning to the J. I will monitor and see what kind of frequency there is.
One of the more interesting sites is the bottle trains which run with molten steel. These are usually 5-10 cars with spacer cars (usually old gondolas) between the bottle cars. They dont go very fast…I would hate to be around if one derailed and tipped over.
Not doubting your statistics at all, S.! And glad to be a part of the transportation that makes it happen. But you can’t go through there at ground level without realizing that there was much, much more at one time. I remember one or two of those other refineries that aren’t there any more.
(Oh–the color of the fields depends on the season. They are green sometimes!)
I gave this thread a Good rating–except for one bum answer and a childish retort, this is the kind of thread that contributes positive knowledge to anyone who looks at it. Thank you all!
I don’t disagree with what you’re seeing, but what we’re really viewing is a lot of superannutated industrial processes that were abandoned in place and never removed. The productivity of Chicago industry by any measure is substantially higher than it was 50 years ago, it just takes a lot less buildings, people, smokestacks, and yes, switch engines, to make it happen. There’s a tendency among us to view this wreckage and conclude that It Used To Be Better and everything is a shadow of its former self. Well, maybe it was more fun back then (my life certainly was!), but it wasn’t more productive, at least not in Chicago. You want real wreckage, try the Mahoning Valley!
Truthfully, you can’t work for a railroad (and have a brain) and not be a bit of a romantic. We all went into railroading because it was the coolest thing on earth, and we all want to cling to how it used to be in our naive youth rather than how it has to be. I thin
I don’t disagree with what you’re seeing, but what we’re really viewing is a lot of superannutated industrial processes that were abandoned in place and never removed. The productivity of Chicago industry by any measure is substantially higher than it was 50 years ago, it just takes a lot less buildings, people, smokestacks, and yes, switch engines, to make it happen. There’s a tendency among us to view this wreckage and conclude that It Used To Be Better and everything is a shadow of its former self. Well, maybe it was more fun back then (my life certainly was!), but it wasn’t more productive, at least not in Chicago. You want real wreckage, try the Mahoning Valley!
Truthfully, you can’t work for a railroad (and have a brain) and not be a bit of a romantic. We all went into railroading because it was the coolest thing on earth, and we all want to cling to how it used to be in our naive youth rather than how it h
Sober! Well that would be no fun! My hat’s off to the dedication of the underpaid regular staff and unpaid volunteers who make our parks and monuments and museums work.
Murphy Siding is correct about the RR and steel are intertwined. At one point the Mon Valley in SW Pa. was the leader in steel production. Pittsburgh was called the “smokey city” as the sun would not be able to penetrate the smoke from the mills. Being that I lived in the greater Pgh. area all my life, I have witnessed the demise of steel. Picairn Yard was the place to watch trains in the 50’s and 60’s. As the steel mills started to decline in the area the yard was phased out, now the only yard is Conway. In the mid to late 60’s, the EPA fined USS for pollution of the air and water. The first time I ever saw the Monongehala River frozen was after the mills started to shut down completely which was in 1970. Andrew Carnegie was a shrewed and committed businessman. Part of getting the PRR to work with USS was his naming the plant in Braddock, Pa after the president of the PRR (Edgar Thompson Works). BTW it is still in production to this day. The area’s mills are disappearing if not already gone completely. Natonal Tube (BOF), Homestaed Works (which was the location of the historic steel strike), and Duquesne Works (home of the largest furnace in the world in it’s day) are all torn down. The only thing left of those mills is the Dorothy Furnace in Duquesne, PA. There is rumor that it may go in the future. The yards that stored the incoming steel and coke are torn up. In the 60’s there were 5 railroads that serviced the city of McKeesport (my home town). PRR, B&O, P&LE, NYC, and the USS road- McKeesport Connecting RR were the roads. Union Railroad had trackage rights via the P&LE and McKeesport Connecting to service the National Tube works. There are a lot of variables that enter into the demise of the steel industry in SW PA., that is a whole other ballgame in itself. It was quite impressive to view the skyline at night when National Tube poured steel. The whole sky lit up orange from it. Memories, memories, memories was exactly correct.
The Bottle Cars (Torpedo cars in the UK) move liquid Pig Iron, as tapped from the Blast Furnace, to Steel Converter Plants, never Steel.
Iron’s melting/freezing temperature is rather higher than Steel’s due to the impurities present, and it’s safe to move by rail over limited distances without risking the cargo solidifying completely.
Silly me - I should have said Iron’s melting / freezing temperature is LOWER than Steel’s.
Never mind, it’s Friday, and I can go to the Rugby Club tonight and reminisce with the other old farts about the contraction of our local Coal, Steel and Tinplate Industries.
There were refineries in East Chicago operated by Sinclair, Mobil and Cities Service. Sinclair was merged into Atlantic Richfield in 1969. That refinery was sold in the late 1970’s to an agricultural co-op and shut down a few years later. The Mobil refinery was replaced by a new facility near Joliet and Cities Service closed down its East Chicago refinery in a downsizing. There was also a small refinery in Burnham operated by Calumet Refining Co. which produced lube oils and other products from low-end feedstocks (no gasoline or kerosene).
Obviously, the steel mills on the Great Lakes ship in their iron ore in boats. Beyond that, isn’t the steel industry mainly a railroad transported business?
Are you aware of the percentages of steel that is moved via rail v trucking?
I tend to agree that it seems as if a high percentage moves by truck, but Inland, oops Mittel seems to move a daily train of coil cars on the NS, and the EJE/NS team up with the 323 train to Fort Wayne daily which has anywhere from 10 to 75 coil cars. No doubt just a drop in the bucket, but better than on the expressways of NW Indiana.
Bureau of Transportation Statistics 2002 Commodity Flow Survey found:
Base Metal in Primary or Semifinished Forms and in Finished Basic Shapes, modal share by weight:
328,053,000 total tons shipped
260,9032000 by truck (79.5%)
44,447,000 by rail (13.5%)
9,174,000 by water (2.8%)
633,000 by truck and rail (0.2%)
Share by value was 86.2% truck, 7.4% rail.
Individual plant statistics take quite a bit of work to infer from the 1% waybill samples, but suffice to say that since the majority of the consumers of Chicago District steel output are in Chicago, northern Indiana, northwest Ohio, and southern Michigan, the rail share might be even worse than that.