Anybody ever come across a book or at least an article about railroad rails?Who manufactured them and where? what they cost etc?The peroid I am thinking about is early 20th century.Any ideas?Ted Miles

Here's a few from Trains magazine.Mikehttp://www.trains.com/content/dynam ... spGuardian of the rails Trains, October 1941 Sperry Rail Service One rail instead of many Trains, March 1942 how rail is welded No clickety-clack Trains, September 1949 page 52 welded rail installed in the Cascade Tunnel Welded rail Trains, February 1950 all about welded rail This is where it begins Trains, September 1964 steel wheel on steel rail Like a giant Lionel train set gone wild Trains, December 1980 brief description of the Speno rail-grinding train Shaped like a capital I Trains, February 1983 a primer on rail ABC's of railroading: rail: the defining element Trains, February 1994 all about rail Readers' platform: the trouble with joints Trains, April 1994 rail joints are trouble spots Ribbons of steel Trains, December 2004 rail is getting bigger and better

mike, Thank you for the quick responce! You seem to have a cumulative index to TRAINS. What is it called and where is it available?Ted Miles

It's on their website, Trains.com. You'll probably have to register, then click on "back issues"http://www.trains.com/maghomepage/maghomepage.asp?idMagazine=1Mike

CF&I Colorado Fuel & Iron, Pueblo Co. made a lot of the rail used in this part of the country.................................................................Wooly

The "Mississippi Rail Sites" links posted above by Mr. Yarger contains some interesting rail specificationsmwhttp://www.icrr.net/rails.htm

Sperry Rail Service has a small book -- more of a pamphlet, really -- on rail testing that includes quite a bit of information on the manufacture of rail. There are also some neat pictures of rail defects. One is a picture of a bolt that somehow got rolled ito a new stick of rail -- somebody was very asleep for THAT one!DO NOT ask me how to get hold of a copy. I got mine through my brief employment with Sperry. Calling or writing to Danbury MAY get you one but as I haven't had any association with the company since 1994, I make no promises. Sperry has a website, but no I don't have the address. Try Google. I also have a Sperry Car FAQ at scrmcurator.com which I haven't even looked at in years, let alone updated.It's easy to tell who made most rails because the mill rolls that data into the side of the web. If you look carefully, you'll see something like this on the web:8040 BETH STEELTON 1924 IIIIWhich means it's 80# rail (8040, which I believe is 80 RE), rolled at Bethlehem's Steelton works in May of 1924 (1924 IIII). You may also see "CC" which means "control cooled."There's also a heat number stamped into the rail web, usually on the opposite side of the web from the mill data. Heat numbers identify the specific batch of steel. This way, a defective rail can be traced back all the way to the batch it came from. The mill data is in raised letters, the heat number is recessed.

A lot of this information is also in the Railway Maintenance and Engineering Cyclopedia, published by Simmonds Boardman various years throughout the last century. Obviously the older books deal more with the multitude of older sections, while later books do not. A big city library or university engineering library ought to have a copy.A very brief summery, just off the top of my head…. There were four "standard" series of rail sections, designed by, in order of introduction, ASCE ( American Society of Civil Engineers), ARA, (American Railroad Association, later the Association of American Railroads), and AREA (American Railway Engineering Association.) The standard shorthand designation was two (or three) digits that were the weight per yard in pounds, combined with two digits that designated the series; ARA-A series was designated 20, ARA-B 30, ASCE 40, and AREA 28. So, in the example above, 8040 is the very common 80 pound per yard ASCE section. In later years when the earlier sections were all but obsolete, the AREA sections were often marked RE rather than 28; 115RE rather than 11528.The original rail steel was all Bessemer steel, and so never had a steel type designation. Lots of rail rolled early in the twentieth century was marked OH for open hearth furnace steel. CC has been common since about mid century.All of the mill lettering is in raised characters on one side of the web, this was common to all rails rolled in that particular mill, and so was engraved in the finishing rollers. The heat number was stamped into the web on the other side, and in addition to the code for the batch of steel, included a letter code for the position the rail was in the ingot: the first rail from the top end was designated A, the next B, and so forth. Since with traditional steel making more porosity is found at the top of the ingot, the test procedure was to test a random sample of A rails first, if these didn't pass all A rails from that heat were scrapped, then to test a sample of B rails, and so on. Quite a few years ago when I was involved in the construction of a new rapid transit shop, the engineering specs for the pit specified that only E and F rails could be used.Probably more than you wanted to know.