Steel2

John Abbott has posted a lot of pictures of the steel industry. Unfortunately, he has not provided much information. Hopefully others will comment on his postings. I've started another posting on steel to save his pictures.

John Abbott posted

John Abbott posted
Ohio Works Demolition
Loyd Boydigan Great pics John, the only steel mill type plant left here is the former U. S. Steel McDonald works. Now called McDonald steel and run as a mini mill. The former Republic Steel blast furnace is still standing for now in Warren, but is scheduled to come down. Vallourec does occupy Sheet and Tube's old open hearth building of the Brier Hill works. Lots of folks here can still remember Black Monday in 1977.James Miller It came as no surprise to me when LTV bought the farm on Nov 10 2001 closing 7 plants and chopping 53,000+ jobsJames Miller Billy Joel sang about the closures in the requiem; "Allentown" in 1982 when many plants shuttered (1977-1987) saw 13.7 million jobs lost due to divestment and overregulation.

John Abbott posted
Bethlehem Steel Mill
Augustine Teng Besseemers doing their job burning off all the unwanted impurities.Alan Vale Those people are skimming by hand wow very dangerousAugustine Teng Actually safer than it appears. After the Besseemer Process,there's nothing left to blow unless water gets in. I have been skimming gunk from crucibles holding molten brass,aluminium etc after degassing and grain refining. Built my own gas fired furnace. Only the Singapore Ingersoll-Rand did it. I had to cast some parts to make condensate traps to complement compressor packages. I know nothing on gravity casting of aluminium. Learnt from McGrawhill HandBooks. My uncles were did deslagging of the cupola furnaces. Was fun to watch from faraway.Ian Wilson We call these guys puddlers

John Abbott posted
Republic Steel Mill
[There are a lot of comments concerning what steel mill are left in US.]

Ian Wilson posted three pictures with the comment:

Construction of Stewarts & Lloyds Steelworks Corby Northamptonshire 1934, the largest steelworks in Britain, at its heyday before nationalisation 1955 when it employed 11,000 workers and the start of its demolition in the 1980s.

1

2

3

John Abbott posted
Bethlehem Steel Mill 8
Travis William Shute https://www.google.com/.../mc-bw-bethlehem-steel-plant... here is some insight why it closed. Hint... it wasn't EPA and it wasn't labor. It also wasn't management.Ken Klatt I work in the modern day steel industry in N. W. Ohio. There are many good paying jobs available in this industry. We are non Union and have great benefits. The problem today is we can't find young people who are willing to this type of work. Everyone wants to sit behind a desk and make big $. Steel making is alive and well in the USA!

John Abbott posted
PITTSBURGH STEEL

John Abbott posted
bethlehem_steel_corp__sparrows_point_mill

John Abbott posted
bethlehem_steel_corp__sparrows_point_mill

John Abbott posted
bethlehem_steel_corp__sparrows_point_mill
[The three guys provide scale as to how big that ladle is.]

John Abbott posted
Dave Hopwood Seem to remember that there was a blast furnace in England, maybe at Scunthorpe, that roared out 40,000 tons of pig iron per day and that was just one of them.....

Andy Pullen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xVWPRWS2cs

[The "L" Furnance (picture 32) stood as recently as 2012. Some neat aerial views after picture 32. RG Steel was also on Sparrows Point. Actually, maybe they were the last owner of the steel plant. Pennsylvania Steel was another name here.]

John Abbott posted
bethlehem_steel_corp__sparrows_point_mill
Binky Dow There was a Bethlehem Steel Ship yard in Quincy Mass. One of the ships built there was the USS Massachusetts which still exist in Fall River Mass.Robert Livingston My father worked at Fore River, a division of Bethlehem Steel, during WWII. He helped pull the cables through the conning towers while Massachusetts was a-building.Binky Dow The USS Salem is still sitting there on display.Robert Phillips Where are they now??? UNION UNION EPA EPA EPA EPA!!!!!!1Robert Livingston Not exactly. My dad graduated from MIT in 1941, trained as a naval architect and marine engineer. But there was little work in the USA designing and building ships after 1945. Had nothing to do with the EPA (not started until the 1970's) nor with unions (no union engineers, ya know). USA had overbuilt its merchant fleet. Supply and demand. There was some big ship building still going on in places like Newport News, VA, but many shipyards closed then.

John Abbott posted
high house bethlehem_steel_corp__sparrows_point_mill
[The comments indicate there is a vertical mold in the floor for big gun barrels and the crane would lift out the castings and shake the sand off.]

John Abbott posted

bethlehem_steel_corp__sparrows_point_mill

Greg McMoses is that a monorail crane that travelled around the site?

Joe Scanlon The Patapsco and Back River Railroad did the pushing and pulling at Sparrows Point.

John Abbott posted
Jason Baker I have made hundreds of parts that go into these rolling mills over the last 20 years. Universal spindles, couplings, drive spades, worm gear centers, the screw down nuts and screws, chocks and work rolls.Terry Smith Roughing Mill ?Jason Baker YesGary Cribb NUCOR Steel Berkeley County, SC.

John Abbott posted
Old Time sheet-mill-rolling
Robert Phillips The days of the tongs:):):):)

John Abbott posted
Bruce Carrick What does the dial indicate?Thomas Rappen distance of rollers... the control guy runs it through, changing the distance.. power so high, that good guys don't need to reheat... my father told me abou two 5kV, 500 kW DC AEG motors on it, anno 1955.

John Abbott posted

John Abbott posted
Gary Cribb One here in our state , located in Georgetown, SC. It has been shuttered for a couple years but has a new buyer that's starting it back up in June.Thomas Rappen steel wires, done from a 4x4" block, ending to 10, 5 and 3mm... running fist through double roll, finally through small dies, smaller done cold, here 20 metric tons, no interuption... my father told me about, and how a poor guy was caught to death...

John Abbott posted
That's Hot...
Thomas Rappen yep, getting colder, love the change of the colors..

John Abbott posted

A Facebook video showing how these old back-forth rolling mills worked. Clues to find it again:

Engineering World with comment "Hard Job!! And Hot..."

John Abbott posted
1890s-Rolling-Mill

John Abbott posted

John Abbott posted

John Abbott posted

John Abbott posted
Steel Rolling Mill 3

John Abbott posted
Rolling Mil l2

John Abbott posted
This mill smoke
Erwin Rommell multi stage rolling mill. when the ingot comes out the other end it is a coil of sheet metal.

John Abbott posted
Ashland Mill

John Abbott posted

John Abbott posted
[Homestead Words?]

John Abbott posted

John Abbott posted
John Abbott This might be Sparrow Point that's the file I was unloading.
[Baltimore?]

John Abbott posted

John Abbott posted

A comment on the above posting provided this YouTube link.


Google Photo of Sparrows Point

20170528-29 Downers Grove Main

Memorial Day Sunday: two commuters and two intermodals.
Memorial Day: two commuters and an outbound intermodal.

As I walked down Main Street to the station, an inbound arrived (4:49).

I should have counted the cars because it seemed to have a lot of them. As expected, it had two engines, 195 and 196. Since it was a Sunday, it would be a local; and I conclude that a lot of horsepower is needed to accelerate that many cars from every station and maintain the schedule.

It had eight cars. Half of them were the newer cars because they had bigger widows. I took this picture to show that a long train will fit on the platform with room to spare. They don't need to stop the engine of an outbound commuter on the street because of platform length. (I went to the car night on June 2 and sat in the outbound shelter while I ate my Aurelio's Pizza. An outbound express roared through town on the middle track. I noticed it had 10 cars. (I can't remember how many engines.) but it appears there is room for two more cars with two engines, barely.)

When I noticed that at least one of the locomotives continued to "smoke,"...

...I zoomed in (55mm) and continued to take pictures because it continued to smoke. Metra keeps complaining that their engines are over 40 years old and that they need new ones. I believe them. Some smoke at the beginning because of turbo lag is not too bad. But to see black smoke emitted continuously past Washington Avenue is bad news.

 I took this distant shot so that I could later digitally zoom to see if it was still smoking.

 It was.

I killed time by walking around a construction site where a bank building and its parking lot used to be.

The power company cut a hole in the treeline so I discovered a vantage point a block west of Forest.

While walking between Forest and Main, I noticed a couple of spikes that were 2" loose with just two ties between them.

Time stamp for an eastbound intermodal: 5:26

YouTube

It had been sunny, but when it approached time for the outbound commuter, guess what passed overhead.

They announced several times that the 5:25 would be 7-15 minutes late to "accommodate boarding." Remember that double engine commuter heading downtown? There must have been a parade or Memorial Service that was expected to end during the late afternoon.
5:35

YouTube

I consider little puff of brown smoke when it first starts pulling away from the station to be OK because it is turbo lag. So some of Metra's engines still run relatively clean.

I'm catching the size of the crowd strung out across the tracks after the gates went up.

Since the weather was great on Memorial Day and my daughter wants me to walk a half hour each day and since I agree with her that I need some exercise, I went to that hole in the tree line that the power company made. I was expecting an eastbound commuter, but when I heard the crossing gates I turned around to see a westbound intermodal.

Since I saw how bad my videos were without a tripod, I decided to do a lot of stills.

I normally don't have problems with rotating my horizontal shots as I did this one. It is not a big deal because the power poles can be rotated to vertical with GIMP.

BNSF #8014  ES44C4 built 1/14, Someone explained that when they run five locomotives on an intermodal, it is a hot intermodel and one unit is a spare because they want to maintain speed with no intermuptions if a unit breaks.

A mistake because I didn't crank the zoom lens to a wide angle quick enough. But I can tell from the above overall picture of the engines that this was #6389  ES44AC built 1/09.

#6986  ES44C4 built 2-6/12

#4419  C44-9W built 1-12/99

#6853  ES44C4 built 1-2/12  Tier III Compliant

A long cut of stacks and everyone of them was double high. Normally I'll see some single high platforms on the Racetrack. (On the transcon (former Santa Fe) the containers are normally all double high.)

I din't bother to take pictures of all of the stacks because it would be too difficult to tell where the pictures overlapped because the containers look too much alike. But I took this picture to show the transition from stacks to pigs.

And that there not only was a container mixed in with the pigs,...

...it was a weird one.

Second from the end was another...

...weird one.

While it was passing me, I could tell by the sound that it was slowing down.

So I took a sequence of pictures to document that it actually stopped. The cars to the right of the train are parked on a track in the Downers Grove yard. The microwave tower is in the center of where the turntable used to be.

Because they built a grade separation at Belmont, they can park a train here without blocking traffic.

And then the inbound commuter that I was expecting showed up next to it.

If I cropped it, this would be a decent cab car photo. I normally don't take photos of the cab cars.

#119 is idling since the train is slowing down for a station stop, so it better not be blowing smoke.

The intermodal has left. I assume it had to stop because of some MoW activity. It is not unusual for BNSF to schedule MoW on the weekends and holidays to minimize impact on commuter and freight traffic.

As I walked down Main Street to the station, an inbound arrived (4:49).

I should have counted the cars because it seemed to have a lot of them. As expected, it had two engines, 195 and 196. Since it was a Sunday, it would be a local; and I conclude that a lot of horsepower is needed to accelerate that many cars from every station and maintain the schedule.

It had eight cars. Half of them were the newer cars because they had bigger widows. I took this picture to show that a long train will fit on the platform with room to spare. They don't need to stop the engine of an outbound commuter on the street because of platform length.

When I noticed that at least one of the locomotives continued to "smoke,"...

...I zoomed in (55mm) and continued to take pictures because it continued to smoke. Metra keeps complaining that their engines are over 40 years old and that they need new ones. Some smoke at the beginning because of turbo lag is not too bad. But to see black smoke emitted continuously past Washington Avenue is bad news.

 I took this distant shot so that I could later digitally zoom to see if it was still smoking.

 It was.

I killed time by walking around a construction site where a bank building and its parking lot used to be.

The power company cut a hole in the treeline so I discovered a vantage point a block west of Forest.

While walking between Forest and Main, I discovered a couple of spikes that were 2" loose with just two ties between them.

Time stamp for an eastbound intermodal: 5:26

YouTube

It had been sunny, but when it approached time for the outbound commuter, guess what passed overhead.

They announced several times that the 5:25 would be 7-15 minutes late to "accommodate boarding." Remember that double engine commuter heading downtown? There must have been a parade or Memorial Service that was expected to end around 5pm.
5:35

YouTube

I little puff of brown smoke when it first starts I consider to be OK. This shows that not all Metra engines blow a lot of black exhaust when they pull out of the station.

I'm catching the size of the crowd strung out across the tracks after the gates went up.

Since the weather was great on Memorial Day and my daughter wants me to walk a half hour each day and since I agree with her that I need some exercise, I went to that hole in the tree line that the power company made. I was expecting an eastbound commuter, but when I heard the crossing gates I turned around to see a westbound intermodal.

Since I saw how bad my videos were without a tripod, I decided to do a lot of stills.

I normally don't have problems with rotating horizontal shots. It is not a big deal because he power poles can be rotated with GIMP.

BNSF #8014  ES44C4 built 1/14

A mistake because I didn't get to a wide angle quick enough. But I can tell from the above overall picture of the engines that this was #6389  ES44AC built 1/09.

#6986  ES44C4 built 2-6/12

#4419  C44-9W built 1-12/99

#6853  ES44C4 built 1-2/12  Tier III Compliant

A long cut of stacks and everyone of them was double high. Normally I'll see some single high on the Racetrack. (On the transcon (former Santa Fe) the containers are normally all double high.)

I din't bother to take pictures of all of the stacks because it would be too difficult to tell where the pictures overlapped because the containers look too much alike. But I took this picture to show the transition from stacks to pigs.

And that there not only was a container mixed in with the pigs,...

...it was a weird one.

Second from the end was another...

...weird one.

While it was passing me, I could tell by the sound that it was slowing down.

So I took a sequence of pictures to document that it actually stopped. The cars to the right of the train are parked on a track in the Downers Grove yard. The microwave tower is in the center of where the turntable used to be.

And then the inbound commuter that I was expecting showed up next to it.

If I cropped it, this would be a decent cab car photo. I normally don't take photos of the cab cars.

#119 is idling, so it better not be blowing smoke.

Looking West to check on the intermodal shows it has left. I assume it had to stop because of some MoW activity. It is not unusual for BNSF to schedule MoW on the weekends and holidays to minimize impact on commuter and freight traffic. Again, the cars that you still see are on a track in the yard.

Looking East, I catch the inbound leaving the station. A big blob of smoke, but it was just turbo lag.

Digitally zoomed

It soon quit smoking.

This is the hole in the trees that I was shooting from. It is at the northwest corner of Permit D Lot (free after 11am).

I walked east of Washington to get a shot of the expected outbound commuter. (The Village Center parking lot and lawn cutting makes this track side accessible.) I happen to notice that a pole had remotely controlled line switches. I could not figure out how it worked. So I took a bunch of pictures from different angles so that later I can digitally zoom in and study them some more.

Then an Amtrak Superliner came at 3:22. Since the California Zephyr (Emeryville, CA) is due into Naperville at 2:34, this better be the Southwest Chief (Los Angeles, CA) that is due in Naperville at 3:50.

The train had one "baggage" car and eight Superliner cars.

Unlike commuters, which are slowing down here for the station, Amtraks go through at the passenger track speed of 70mph. Just because railfans make it look easy getting a picture of the lead locomotive, it is not easy when the train is moving that fast. At least I did grab both engine numbers.

I tried to keep that mile marker of "21" out of my pictures, but it is just part of the clutter in this photo.

The streetlight over the engine pretty well destroys this shot.

So we have one engine, #113, pulling eight cars on a holiday local. Does running with a packed train on Sunday vs. a normal train on Monday make a difference in the horsepower needed to accelerate? I notice the pattern that the Metra logo is high on the new cars and low on the old cars. I went back to one of my first photos where I have a picture of the cars on the north side. There is no logo on that side.

I had noticed the brakes on the rear of the train were squealing. The squeal was so loud it practically hurt my ears. Now I see the last two cars were new ones. Hopefully the brake shoes will wear in and quit squealing.

Arrival time was 3:30. It was due at 3:25.

And the commuters disperse. Maybe I was too busy crossing the tracks to notice, but I did not see any smoke out of this engine.