March 1943. “Santa Fe R.R. shops, Albuquerque. Hammering out a drawbar on the steam drop hammer in the blacksmith shop.” 4×5 Kodachrome transparency by Jack Delano for the Office of War Information.

Interesting thing here is the stock the drawbar is being forged from appears to be an old axle. When I was with the CTA during the seventies, the Frog Shop forged old car axles into flat stock, planed it flat, then cut coupler carry irons from it. The power hammer was only about half the size of the one in the photo, and ran on air. Wonder if it's still in place at West Shop?

Dennis,
If youy look through the Santa fe steam folio you will find that Santa fe rarely tossed anything into the scrap metal pile. Crank pins were turned down to size for smaller engines then once to small they were turned into drawbar pins. Just about every piece of metal had a reuse and there are instructions on where each item was to go or where it was to be held for eventual reuse.

In this day and age is it even cost effective to do this? By the time you pay labor for the forging, is it just cheaper to order new bar stock in the correct finished size?

It wasn't then (1970's). The key is, if you want new flat stock, you had to go through Purchasing, whereas, if the shops did it, the time was "lost". Never underestimate the ability of middle management to work the rules to keep their a$$ out of the sling.

Anyway. I got to see hammer forging fifty years after it was no longer commercially viable because of this.

Notice the ear and eye protection!

I had another look at the photo, and notice some additional details...

First off, in reply to a comment in another thread, yes, this photo is staged, in that they stopped the hammer and told everybody to hold their pose. The color film of the day was waaay too slow to capture motion indoors. But it is obvious that the crew was in the middle of forging this old axle into a square bar.

They're right at the point where they are going to set the finish thickness. The guy at the far right is the crew boss; you can't see it because the guy running the hammer is in the way, but the he's is holding the handle of a "gauge block" that's resting on the anvil next to the piece being forged. You can see the steel rod handle running out to the right.

When the blacksmiths at CTA would do forging like this, the hammer guy would get the hammer stroking continuously above the work, then slowly lower the point where it reversed it's stroke until it was beating on the the work. A couple guys on the tongs would slide the work back and forth under the hammer, reducing it's thickness, and being careful to not induce a twist. When they were close to finish dimension, the gang boss would take the gauge block and hold it on the anvil; the operator would single stroke the hammer, and the cold steel block would keep it from going beyond the desired dimension. The tongs man would reposition the work for each blow.

It was an interesting operation to watch.