# in what form was iron transported?



## Guest (May 12, 2009)

iron ore gets crushed, then melted.

the once molten iron or steel - in what form was it produced and transportated about 150 years ago?

did they make rolled out sheets or bars, or did they make ingots? or what else?
anybody got information?


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## Mike Reilley (Jan 2, 2008)

Iron ore is transported to a steel mill in gondola or hopper cars. The ore is crushed to a powdery consistency, separated once again to get anything that isn't iron out, and then it's dumped in a crucible for melting. Older mills used blast furnaces to do the melting...newer ones use electric arc furnaces. Once it's been run through a blast/electric arc furnace, it becomes molten pig iron and in some mills is poured into bottle cars for transport to a foundry mill...usually on the same mill grounds. At most mills,including those with bottle cars, the liquid iron may also be poured into sand molds to make rough castings for future refinement at a foundry mill. When cast, the output is called pig iron. These are shipped in flatcars or gondolas to a foundry mill...usually loaded these days by cranes with big magnets.

Once it's at the foundry mill, it is reheated and other chemicals and other minerals are added depending on the kind of steel material being made. Once that is complete, the molten steel is poured into ingots or bars. These are transported by rail frequently to rolling mills...sometimes on the same mill grounds, sometimes not. Now a days, these are usually pretty large...maybe a foot by a foot by 8'...and therefore, very heavy. Frankly, the size of these ingots is dictated by the method of transportation to be used to get the ingots to the rolling mill.

Once at the rolling mill, the ingots get reheated in a furnace to soften them and are either rolled or extruded into plate steel or into beams or wire. Plate steel is made by rolling and rerolling the ingots until it is the correct thickness. Wire mills heat the ingot to soften it and use a combination of rollers and wire extruders to make wire in various sizes...for nails or steel cable usually. 

At this point, it is stacked or rolled for further transport, usually to a company that does steel fabrication....whether it's cars, washing machines, or ships. Beams are shipped to steel fabricators where they are cut to length and fabricated into the beams used to build buildings or bridges. Then they're shipped by rail too..or truck. 

One interesting kind of steel mill is the one that makes rail. Rail is extruded like a beam or wire after reheating the ingots. I still don't know if they really manufacture 1/4 miles lengths of rail...or whether the mill welds and grinds individual rail segments into a longer segment.


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## coyote97 (Apr 5, 2009)

Ore, Steel and Iron is really interesting for RRs.
My CCRR also has a ore-mine to serve.


As manifold the methods of manufacturing were and are, as manifold are the ways of transport. That is was i name "origin-circulation".  When there was a problem, they tried to solve it...with more or less success.


So when they recognized how expensive it is to reheat the steel, they developped even a transport who takes the the liquide steel oder iron. Not just for internal use ---for transport of hundreds of miles.


What i find remarkable of rail-profiles is the flexibility. on standard-gauge lines it is no problem to trnsport rails of any length...just the max. length of the train cuts it. In europe mostly 120m-pieces are used. (about 400 feet).


But for all other products there is nearly no reservation: bars, coils, form-profiles, nearly everything is possible.


regards


Frank


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## Dwight Ennis (Jan 2, 2008)

in what form was it produced and transportated about 150 years ago?
I know the early railroads used wooden rails with iron straps affixed to them, so iron was made into, and I imagine transported as, strap and rectangular bar. The early railroads began replacing wooden iron-strapped rails with solid iron rails, so they would have been made and transported as such. 

As much of the iron horse was then made of sheet iron, it would have also been transported as sheet. Lastly, it was used to make castings, and so castings would have been crated and shipped. 

I'm sure there are many ways I haven't thought of here - perhaps angles and structural shapes as the Eiffel Tower was built in 1889 from iron, and similar materials were undoubtedly used here in the USA for bridge and structural construction.


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## cephius (Jan 10, 2008)

kormsen, 
There's good documentation on Russian Iron, which is a finished iron product. It was always shipped in plates to the factory that would turn it into the end product; stoves, boiler jackets, etc. 

Dave


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## Guest (May 12, 2009)

thank you Mike. 
do you know hoe big these ingots were in the old times before 1900?


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## George Schreyer (Jan 16, 2009)

pig iron, or ingots, were limited by weight. A man needed to lift them so they rarely exceeded about 100 lbs. Pigs were sometimes "cast" in pits in the ground in the very early days of iron processing. A slope below the furnace was prepared with channels and pits and the molten iron was allowed to flow out of furnace, through the passageways and into the pits. When cooled, they were picked up, loaded onto something and hauled off to another mill for fabrication into basic shapes, strap, bar and plate.


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## Mike Reilley (Jan 2, 2008)

A bit more....I missed the 150 years ago part. 150 years ago, much of the steel made was forged....by blacksmiths. There were very few (if any) rolling mills...and the modern foundry process was in its infancy. Most "steel" was actually pig iron that had been pounded or cast into some shape and hammered. Pig iron is very fragile...almost like glass...and heating and hammering of it gave it a degree of toughness. The foundry processes did remelt the pig iron and combine it with other elements (to make early steel)...but a lot of the "steel" made back in 1850 was actually forged by hand. And, as George pointed out, everything was pretty small as there was very little made of "steel" back then.


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## Guest (May 12, 2009)

thanks to all. 
so it might be ingots (of any shape) or plates or bars. 
with about 100 pound, the pig iron must have had small size.


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## SteveC (Jan 2, 2008)

The first steel produced in Europe was called "Blister Steel", the process was called 'Cementation.' The iron from which this steel was made was high-grade Swedish bar wrought iron that had very low levels of impurities. The iron bars were stacked in stone boxes with layers of charcoal in between, the stone top was placed on the box and then heated in a furnace for about a week. The blisters or uneven surface caused by the uneven absorption of carbon from the charcoal bringing the carbon content up somewhere around than 1%, although this percentage varied all over the place from one point on a given rod to any other point on the same rod, and variation was continued from one rod to another.

In an effort to make resulting product more homogeneous in nature, after the rods had cooled a number of the rods would be bound together, heated, and then hammer-forged, then folded, heated again, and hammer-forged again. This was known as "shear steel" the quality of the steel was indicated by the number assigned to the end product (i.e. #1, #2, #3 shear steel etc.), the number assigned indicated the number of times sequence of heating, hammer-forging, and folding had been repeated. The higher the number the more homogeneous the resulting steel was.

The first use of "crucible steel" in England was the result of a clockmaker looking for a better grade of steel for his springs. Through experimentation he developed a process where he used refractory clay to make the crucibles, used coke to fire the furnace, and mixed wrought iron with blister steel, and wound up with both a superior steel and a lower cost to produce it.


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## SteveC (Jan 2, 2008)

Korm

Regarding the subject of 'Russia Iron' you might find the following PDF files of interest. Left-click the links to open the file, or right-click the links and use the 'Save Target As...' menu option to download a copy.

*http://1stclass.mylargescale.com/stevec/Russia_Iron/Planished_Iron_Patents-02.pdf*

*http://1stclass.mylargescale.com/stevec/Russia_Iron/Practicle_Hand-Appendix.pdf* 

*http://1stclass.mylargescale.com/stevec/Russia_Iron/Research_Russia_Iron.pdf*

Hopefully the above is found to be of use, and interesting.


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## Big John (Jan 4, 2008)

There was a song about how the railroads charged different rates for shipping different commodities on their sections of track. Can't remember the name of the song but one verse sticks in my mind. The engineer is singing he is loaded with pigs to avoid paying a higher price for using the tracks. As his train leaves the station he hollers back "Fooled You I Have All Pig Iron". So I guess they did ship a lot of pig iron. 

John


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## SteveC (Jan 2, 2008)

Hey Korm

I dug up an answer for you regarding "pig iron" ingots.

The information comes from the following book, the link below is to the PDF version available via Google books.

*http://books.google.com/books?id=0ttIAAAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=encyclopedia+of+founding&lr=#PPP9,M1*

The Encyclopedia Of Founding
Simpson Bolland
1894

Sand Pig Iron - 40" x 4" x 4" = 640 cu.in.
640 cu.in. x 0.263 lb./cu.in. = 168.32 lb.

Edit: Almost forgot, the industrial mass production of steel in massive quantities, didn't start until Henry Bessemer patented his process in October, 1855. Until then steel was just too expensive to use for other than special purposes.

As for how they came to be called 'pig iron' the following link explains.

*http://www.engr.psu.edu/MTAH/essays/pigiron.htm*


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## SteveC (Jan 2, 2008)

John

That is from the song '_The Rock Island Line_'

*http://www.sing365.com/music/lyric.nsf/The-Rock-Island-Line-lyrics-Johnny-Cash/DA46009B43870890482571E40009B4A5*


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## tacfoley (Jan 3, 2008)

Mike - they really ARE made in 1/4mile long lengths, and then put directly onto rail-laying trains. Been there and seen it done.

tac
www.ovgrs.org


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## Torby (Jan 2, 2008)

I've twice seen specials on the old Japanese sword masters. Utterly astounding.


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## Guest (May 13, 2009)

thanks to all. 

i learned, that from the whole mining process only the transport of raw ore is interesting for transport modelling. 
but i think, a blast furnace, where the hot iron is filled in the pig-moulds, would be a challenging project to build. 

@Steve, the site with the minute-essays is really interesting for early years modelling.


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## Les (Feb 11, 2008)

Posted By Big John on 05/12/2009 8:47 PM
There was a song about how the railroads charged different rates for shipping different commodities on their sections of track. Can't remember the name of the song but one verse sticks in my mind. The engineer is singing he is loaded with pigs to avoid paying a higher price for using the tracks. As his train leaves the station he hollers back "Fooled You I Have All Pig Iron". So I guess they did ship a lot of pig iron. 

John








John,

That song is 'The Rock Island Line'. It's one of my favorite oldies. Popular in the 50's--at least, that's when I heard it.

Les


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## Paradise (Jan 9, 2008)

A bit stray here but the worlds first iron bridge was all cast and put together more like something made of timber. 
Dovetails, pins and wedges etc. It all can move a little which stops it breaking apart. 

The world's first cast iron bridge was built over the River Severn at Coalbrookdale in 1779. 
Not only iron founders and industrial spies flocked to see this wondrous bridge, but also artists and travellers. 
The Bridge had a far reaching impact: on local society and the economy, on bridge design and on the use of cast iron in building. 












_From Wikipedia:_ _Eiffel Tower1889_ As demonstration of the economy of design, if the 7300 tonnes of the metal structure were melted down it would fill the 125 meter square base to a depth of only 6 cm (2.36 in), assuming a density of the metal to be 7.8 tonnes per cubic meter. The tower has a mass less than the mass of the air contained in a cylinder of the same dimensions,[7] that is 324 meters high and 88.3 meters in radius. The weight of the tower is 10,100 tonnes compared to 10,265 tonnes of air.


Puddle iron is a type of wrought iron, used mainly in construction. Its production process was invented at the end of the eighteenth century, following an increase in the need for wrought iron. It is produced in a puddling furnace. The process results with an iron that contains a slightly increased carbon content compared to wrought iron. This provides it with a higher tensile strength. The puddling furnace also allows a better control of the chemical composition of the iron. The Eiffel Tower was built with puddle iron for a large part of its structure, as was the framework of the Statue of Liberty. Other standing structures such as bridges also used puddle iron.












Andrew


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