Classification: UNCLASSIFIED
Caveats: NONE

There are also many other loads that might have originated offline in those
hoppers, including ferromanganese, gravel, limestone/dolomite, coke, alloying
additives, etc. My reaction was similar when seeing hoppers of the SP and
ATSF on the PRR.

Elden Gatwood

Elden is correct. I work at a steel mill and years ago received alloys and additives by rail. Those containers in gons were not liked. The bno had hoppers with colored(orange) ends for ferro manganese. Mark Morgan
PS eaf operator making stainless
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Mark Morgan wrote:

Elden is correct. I work at a steel mill and years ago received alloys and additives by rail. Those containers in gons were not liked. The bno had hoppers with colored(orange) ends for ferro manganese.

How many years ago, Mark? Things changed greatly from, say, the early 1950s to the early 1960s as far as cargoes in covered hoppers.

Tony Thompson Editor, Signature Press, Berkeley, CA
2906 Forest Ave., Berkeley, CA 94705 www.signaturepress.com
(510) 540-6538; fax, (510) 540-1937; e-mail, thompson@...
Publishers of books on railroad history

Hello, Tony
Mansfield, Ohio   1914 started from Davey family(Mansfield Sheet and Tin Plate Co) Seven Open- hearth furnaces in the original plant with a floor wide for pushers and railroad cars. The gondolas carried lime, fusite and etc. Crane would pull them to the floor and shovel the load in a box or furnace. Tacky said he hated them because they were hard to open. Under that floor was a furnaces tunnels and pipes, further north they unloaded boxcars of brick and refractory supplies.
Wish had pictures from that old time. Now that building is storage and brick mason area. I remember all those tracks and it was something to see. This plant was not near a river! Two railroads were was on each side of our plant. B&O and PRR The PRR supplied the coal for the boiler plant along with sharing switching with the B&O. 
I shoveled out some gondolas back in the seventies. Started May 31, 1977.  Two EAF furnaces are in our plant. #8 and #9, I operate number nine, she puts out 135 tons every two hours. 
Might be too much but thought someone might like this.Mark Morgan

Classification: UNCLASSIFIED
Caveats: NONE

I love hearing this stuff, Mark. I grew up listening to guys talk about the
"mills". I knew some Dads and Uncles that worked the furnaces and open
hearths, and wish I had asked more about some of the details.

One guy told me about "mud guns", and I forgot to ask what kind of clay they
used in them, and how they processed it. I had asked many questions later
about it, and was told the furnaces also used additives like calcium carbide,
dolomite, fluorspar ("spar"), and of course lots of limestone, in addition to
the ore and coke, which I have not seen modeled much.

The OHs', electric furnaces and BOP/BOFs used chromium, cobalt, manganese,
molybdenum, nickel, soda ash (sodium carbonate), and scrap, also not modeled
as loads very much.

The whole refractory end of this is also interesting. I saw box cars loaded
with pallets of brick in the plants. I have done two box car models with
doors open and pallets of brick inside for my model plant.

By when I was a teenager, some of the older furnaces had their refractory
deteriorated to the point that USS made the decision to produce ferro, not
regular hot metal, in some of the furnaces. They shipped the ferro in in
mostly old two-bay hoppers, with a partial load because I guess it was heavy.
I have tried to model a couple of those guys.

One thing I remember was hopper doors held shut with wooden frames jammed
between the bays, I guess because they didn't want to risk the doors
accidentally opening, with such a valuable load. I am not sure what it was,
but these foreign ores may have been costly. Has anyone modeled this?

It is all very interesting to try and model the actual application of these
to loads, but also to try and model the effects of this service on models.

Elden Gatwood

Gatwood, Elden wrote:

By when I was a teenager, some of the older furnaces had their refractory deteriorated to the point that USS made the decision to produce ferro, not regular hot metal, in some of the furnaces.

This can't be the right story, Elden. Refractories deteriorate all the time and are replaced in any furnace, even blast furnaces. The furnaces might have been too old or too small to continue making steel, and were converted to other use.
Ferroalloys are normally made by specialty producers, and steel companies USE the ferroalloy. Why USS would get into that business isn't clear to me. Can you tell us more, like which ferroalloys they produced?

Tony Thompson Editor, Signature Press, Berkeley, CA
2906 Forest Ave., Berkeley, CA 94705 www.signaturepress.com
(510) 540-6538; fax, (510) 540-1937; e-mail, thompson@...
Publishers of books on railroad history

Elden and Tony. I recall reading about a blast furnace making ferro manganese. Somehow they had a breakout and the mess was broke up and crushed into smaller pieces. This is dense and a shove full would be at least thirty pounds(recall 45#).
We used to make carbon grades at work. The most was called 130 grade which had was similar to 1006. High carbon manganese was added at tap by dumping in the ladle by the crane. The craneman would bring the box over head back to the floor, a good one could lower onto raised forks on a towmotor!
OSHA would go bananas over this :-)

Mark Morgan

PS 4 day weekend

Classification: UNCLASSIFIED
Caveats: NONE

I should have been more specific, and not used abbreviations or mill
terminology. "Ferromanganese" is used as an additive in the furnace, but the
iron workers I knew called the end product "ferro", which as Tony inferred is
hot metal high in Manganese.

Ferromanganese arrived at the mills I knew, in small hoppers, partially
loaded. In the era past the end of this list's interest, both RDG and B&O
used old offset twins, with end panels painted orange, in dedicated service
moving ferromanganese. You could model this service very easily, but the
loads are a bit tricky. I have used actual ore, but it is messy. I also
have raw iron ore I use in cars and it, too is messy, but it sure looks good.

Sorry this next part was confusing....The mill workers I talked to stated
that "ferro" production was hard on refractory, and thus, USS did not like
using brand new refractory-equipped blast furnaces to produce it. Thus, they
tended to use furnaces that had old refractory, and may have been idled
eventually in favor of newer furnaces that had newer refractory, to produce
it.

The fact that they used a series of older furnaces in the Mon Valley to
produce ferro would tend to support this. The old furnaces at Clairton
produced ferro in the late 50's and early 60's. The old furnaces that had
been idled at National Tube in the late sixties produced ferro in the early
seventies, and the old furnaces at Duquesne were used for ferro in between,
with the other furnaces at Duquesne, and all at ET and Carrie, producing
regular hot metal.

I was also told by an older mill worker who worked at National Tube, that the
end product referred to by him as "ferro" was the desirable hot metal used in
tube-making (big pipe), of which there were many varieties.

A very typical load out of McKeesport was a load of ductile pipe, in many
different diameters, but usually of the same size in one gon. They were
loaded on dunnage that crossed the bottom of the floor, and banded in between
vertical wooden stakes, if they exceeded the height of the side. National
Tube owned a small fleet of its own gondolas, lettered for the McKeesport
Connecting Railroad. These loads appeared all over the country, with many
loads of large-diameter tube going west to serve the oil industry and later
natural gas producers. Other USS-owned roads had those gons, too, including
Lake Terminal, Union RR, and B&LE.

I hope we get a model of one of those gons one day.

Elden Gatwood