There's an interesting photo (link below) on the Rail Pictures website of a couple of 6' gauge ore trolleys at the Bethlehem Steel works in 1993. Does anyone know whether these still exist, and what - if any - plans exist regarding their future? Thanks!

http://www.railpictures.net/viewphoto.php?id=31783

Frank,

They were still around as of a few months ago. These are the "charging larries" I referred to in my post below. There were many variations among the fleet. I was fortunate enough to get up close and personal with a few of them. Neat beasts!

They spent thier time on the "highline" which had standard ga. track for coke trains to reach the blast furnaces, and the wide ga. track for the larries to bring in the charge materials. The line is still intact AFAIK. Mike Piersa can probably give you a current update.

Rob Davis

The cars still exist, and might run again. The cars are seven foot, ten and a half inch gauge. In company literature, they are referred to as ore transfer cars and there are two types, side dump and bottom dump. The side dump cars were used near the ore bridges, underneath the furthest working position of the bucket, on tracks running parallel to the bridge tracks (the 574 foot long bridges, one of which survives, ran on standard gauge tracks 247 feet away from each other, from the center of each track). The other cars were bottom dump cars (pictured at the link on the 1st post) that took loads of iron pellets on the highline (also referred to as the Hoover-Mason trestle for its designers), and dumped them into the Hoover-Mason system of stock bins. The bins fed Atlas Car & Manufacturing Company built electric (trolley) powered scale cars that moved, weighed, and dropped the material into skip buckets that were hoisted to the top of the blast furnaces. All of these items still exist.

The broad gauge transfer cars are parked atop the trestle and can be seen from one spot on Daly Avenue between buildings just west of the Minsi Trail Bridge. The sidewalk on the bridge itself also offers views of the equipment. Under Bethlehem Steel, who originally planned the redevelopment of the historic steel mill, the transfer cars were intended to be restored to transport passengers from a parking area to the retail/entertainment/museum area of BethWorks. The new owners, BethWorks Now, intend to preserve the trestle as it is in “very good conditionâ€

I love the Bethlehem mill. Let me make that clear that there is no other industrial site on earth that enthralls me like this place. Yesm that stems from early childhood memories (riding behind steam on an excusrion past the blast furnaces at night was UNREAL!), but also because of the hours I got to spend inside the plant in its last months of operations.

You haven't lived until you have been in an old school blast furnace at tap time.


The scale cars under the highline shuttled back and forth in a hellish cavern next to the furnaces. I close my eyes as I type this and I still can't believe there was such a place.

Several parts of the mill scared the poop out of me, and that was one of them.

This facility was (and in many ways still is) the ultimate monument to the working man.

Just unreal.

Rob

I'm fascinated by the fact that these monster devices are called "larries." Everyone in Michigan must know that this is what the little four-wheeled wooden flat cars pulled by Fairmont cars were called on the GTW. I suspect this word was imported from the Canadian National.

My guess is that larry was originally the same word as the British "lorry," which means what we would call a highway truck. Can anyone confirm this, or explain where "larry" came from?

It's my guess the term is of British origin, probably in the mining industry. In the anthracite fields, larry cars were self-propelled dump cars used to carry culm and rock away from the breaker. Many such terms emigrated with the Welsh and English miners. I just put another one together recently. Some folks in this part of the world refer to work flats as "sill cars," and in the mines, ties are referred to as "sills." Now, if I could figure out why mine cars are sometimes known as "jimmies," I'd be happy.

If that was hell on earth, imagine visiting Chinese steel mills in the 1980s. No OSHA there!

Steve,

OSHA wasn't exactly a comfort in Bethlehem. There were a lot of really sketchy bits of the mill.

Most chilling to me was the site where one of the huge power plant stationary steam engines dropped a rod and sent tons of machinery through the operator's desk (and operator) and into the wall. The scars from it were unreal.

And then there was the water separator tanks (about three stories high) the top of which was a walkway in regular use despite being rusted through in spots big enough to look intot he chruning water inches below!

Of course, no mention of the mill would be com0plete without reference to the amazing porn collections carefully cut and pasted in the interiors of gurad shacks, operator booths and lockers. Wonder if they'll be preserved?

Rob

Reminds me of an incident report I found while searching the web for surviving steam pumps where a worker working on a steam pump fell to his death into a vat of 160-180 degree industrial waste.

Steel Worker Dies in an Industrial Waste Pit in Pennsylvania

Colin Garratt's photography inside the Chinese steel mills while photographing the steam locomotives themselves captured the atmosphere to some degree. Another interesting aspect was dumping the molten slag; he said the heat from the slag could be felt from some distance away.

-James Hefner
Hebrews 10:20a

Surviving World Steam Project

The first time I was invited into a furnace at Bethlehem to watch a tap and pour, one of the crew regaled us with the story of the evaportating employee.

For those that are not "into" steel mills, the building that you generally think of is pretty much a housing around a giant coffee pot where coke is burned to heat up the mineral charge that will be come the molten steel. When the coffee is ready, instead of pouring it out the top, a drill bit is sent into the bottom of the pot and the molten metal flows out through channels in a sand covered floor. These rivers or orange hell are directed into chutes over the familiar "football" or "bottle" rail cars which take the hot metal to the areas where it will be worked.

The furnace workers navigate the furnace room floor in space suits, walking on sandy walkways and over open grates that keep them out of the molten lava.

So how can a man evaporate in there?

The hot metal will react violently if it comes in contact with water, which is why furnaces are not exposed to the elements.

Railroaders in the mills go to great legnths to make sure the bottle cars are dry inside before send them to be loaded. If a car is wet, the reaction of the metal and the water will jettison the lava flow back up out of the car and into the furnace house.

In the case at Bethlehem, a wet car was placed for loading. When the gates were opened and the molten metal hit the water, the gyser of lava came back into the house and passed through an emplotee working the gate. Nothing was left of him. He was reduced to vapor.

That was 25 years before I first visited the mill.

Nothing had changed.

Rob

I've never visited the Bethlehem site, nor really studied what the plans for it are like, but the "fountain of hoppers" proposal strikes me as typical of what most developers see in such a facility. Instead of a historic site dedicated to the sweat and toil of American industry, with all its inherent grit exposed, they see the site as yet another shopping mall implanted into old buildings. This is essentially what happened at Steamtown, with the pretty new construction completing the roundhouse circle. Steamtown didn't have much true historic potential to start with, but other sites do and the developers view them the same. Everything must be made pretty with decorative elements, landscaping and shrubbery. One wonders what they might try to install in a really gruesome site like Auschwitz (Crematorium Barbequed Ribs perhaps?). Certainly gritty old industrial sites need to be made safe for the visiting public, but for those that are complete and have potential as genuine historic sites, treating them like another old mill building with factory outlet stores (whether there be actual stores or just modern museum exhibits with touch-screen electronics, etc.) is the wrong way to go. It's time to show people that years ago not everyone worked in a padded cubicle in front of a computer monitor..

Robert,
You should write of your visits and experiances in the mill and post them at your website.