Western Railroad Discussion > American Steel Would Have Done It

UP has had a tough couple of weeks with the colder nights and problems with cheap rail! Over the last 3 weeks, they have had many broken rails and a derailment at Woodford.
Some of the issues seem to be with the colder weather and brittle rail from overseas that was never meant to handle the tonnage of our trains! The UP may have saved a few million, but now it is costing them and BNSF bigtime. They spent a few years replacing rail on Tehachapi that is basically brittle and cheap and not up to standards from what I was told.  One other factor is that Tehachapi is a moving railbed that is always changing.  A track worker told me that " the curvature and geology on this line doesn't lend itself very well to cheap steel,  not up here ".
Maybe others on the forum can address the rash of derailments and broken rails lately!

Here is UP 7070 on the work train to clean up the mess at least it looks good.

 



Edited 5 time(s). Last edit at 10/13/19 16:45 by spsniper.

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japaneese steel?

https://www.trainorders.com/discussion/read.php?1,4416196,4417271#msg-4417271

https://www.trainorders.com/discussion/read.php?6,4396503,4396665#msg-4396665

 



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/13/19 19:15 by dan.

UP does use Japanese rails. I recollect Lance Fritz bragging about how much money they’d saved at a rail shipper conference several years ago. It really kind of pissed me off when you consider UP could just as easily have paid a bit more and supported US steel producers that were also UP customers.

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they built a dock i assume and a ship

 Is there any information to back up the claim that this steel was in fact from overseas? With a large operation like UP and BNSF they have standards in every department and rail is no exception. There are metallurgic reports from the mill that proof the chemical makeup of the steel by percentage. This is traceable with Heat numbers and purchase order numbers. I worked in manufacturing for a major oilfield service company and we also had standards and kept track of every piece of steel we bought, transferred heat numbers to products produced from it and was all readily available at customer request. No different that steel building construction or aerospace. All manufactured items have certain specifications that have to be adhered to.
    While I certainly wont argue the fact that there is some real junk out there on the market I would say that UP purchased the rail so someone approved the purchase and if in fact it doesn't meet required spec then someone either was trying to look good by saving money and lied or flat out didn't know what they were  buying.
   Most of the material I purchased was from a branch of a company called energy alloys and all of the large seamless specialty pipe out of Louisiana and most was from a mill in Germany. Always good material, good spec sheets etc. But, they were all on an approved vendors list and were regularly audited for quality. So with that being said, if in fact someone did buy a bunch of junk for whatever reason theyre a victim of their own creation.

Just want to make sure to clarify, this is just what one track foreman told me! 

Well, we all remember the posts about the ship loads of rail coming into Stockton Harbor and the
dockside facility to process the CWR. Believe that rail was Chinese.

Out

I recall hearing that the UP was purchasing their steel sticks of rail in longer lengths from Asia (Japan I believe) and that they had set up a welded rail plant on the west coast to assemble welded rail as it rolled off the ship.
Now on a couple of journeys south I have seen welded rail trains at the Pueblo Minnequah works so I presume we are getting rail from them too. They use electric furnaces to recycle used steel. Perhaps this might be an issue too.

Bob Krieger
Cheyenne, WY

”While I certainly wont argue the fact that
> there is some real junk out there on the market I
> would say that UP purchased the rail so someone
> approved the purchase and if in fact it doesn't
> meet required spec then someone either was trying
> to look good by saving money and lied or flat out
> didn't know what they were  buying.
>    Most of the material I purchased was from a
> branch of a company called energy alloys and all
> of the large seamless specialty pipe out of
> Louisiana and most was from a mill in Germany.
> Always good material, good spec sheets etc. But,
> they were all on an approved vendors list and were
> regularly audited for quality. So with that being
> said, if in fact someone did buy a bunch of junk
> for whatever reason theyre a victim of their own
> creation.“




Two years ago NS discovered that something like 4.5 million or so ties they had purchased and installed were defective as the supplier had never treated them with creosote. The tie supplier had used other substances to make the ties appear to have been treated. NS apparently didn’t catch the problem till the ties began to prematurely wear out.

I have to believe NS inspected a representative sampling of the ties as they were delivered and still didn’t catch the omission.

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Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/13/19 18:37 by Juniata.

Early in the morning there has been some broken rails south of Palmdale beside Tehachapi.
Dennis

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Article says domestic couldn't do it.

https://trn.trains.com/news/news-wire/2018/08/01-up-rail-shipment-delayed-six-weeks-trumps-tariffs-involved

NASA bought good ol' American aluminum from a company in Portland and it caused $700 million worth of satellites to end up at the bottom of the ocean.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-01/nasa-says-aluminum-fraud-caused-700-million-satellite-failures

Japanese steel mills can make rail designed to handle any tonnage they need to.

spsniper Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------

> Some of the issues seem to be with the colder
> weather and brittle rail from overseas that was
> never meant to handle the tonnage of our trains!
> The UP may have saved a few million, but now it is
> costing them and BNSF bigtime.

So Evraz couldn't produce rail for Tehachapi that BNSF uses system wide? There's a cost
saving hiding here somewhere and Japan was part of all that dumping controversy.

Out

I take issue with your whole posting from one foreman but because of social media irrational reactions I question if I should even try to explain what all is wrong here, but because I was over four level higher than that foreman in my career I will try.  Was the derailment at Woodford directly caused by a broken rail?  What are those broken rails caused by?  Were they actually internal rail defects?  What was the inspection schedule for Sperry?  Maybe all the so-called broken rails were failed field weld, or ever failed detection of welds of the rail after it came off the boat. What was the rail temperature when it was laid and locked to the road bed with rail anchors? Maybe the anchor system used is failing and the rail has crept and obtained extreme tension and that is not a cause of the quality of the steel.  The posting spoke about Tehachapi so the foreman may be correct that welded rail might not fit well in that area as the earth may well be moving up and down and slight changes in other direction so that can change the compression and tension in the rails with no way to ever measure what is happening.  There has never been a system found to measure the compression or tension within laid rail.  You can measure the temperature and the gaps in jointed rail to learn its condition at normal temperature.

All the term of Junk, cheap, quality, bridle have no data to back up as it is all relative and should be removed from the post.  I believe the UP was buying harden rail for better life in a curved environment so if they paid less for it, that is more relative to the value of labor in other countries and the exchange rate for the money.  We do agree the Chinees are working for less pay than American steel workers and have modern factories using less labor. I believe the only rail plant in UP area is at Pueblo, CO and they may have been booked years ahead for their production and they did not sell heat treated rail to fit the needs of the UP. 

The title may be okay in this post but the body of the story missed the point of why did any rail break.  
 

Juniata Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> UP does use Japanese rails. I recollect Lance
> Fritz bragging about how much money they’d saved
> at a rail shipper conference several years ago.
> It really kind of pissed me off when you consider
> UP could just as easily have paid a bit more and
> supported US steel producers that were also UP
> customers.
>

BN did extensive testing of rail between Scenic and Skykomish in the late 70s, using various US and foreign rails (the summer of the endless steel gangs, but not as bad as replacing several miles of ties in the Cascade Tunnel after a big smokin' wreck). They found the Japanese rail they used to be the best suited for the location. There must be something else involved than "Japanese."

TAW

Plywood Wrote"I believe the UP was buying harden rail for a better life in a curved environment"

All good points by Plywood but:

Are you sure the rail factory in Pueblo, CO  was booked at the time?  Maybe they were booked at the time, you might be right but sounds like you are guessing too? Also, how come they couldn't use BNSF rail for this segment? Oh yeah, something about saving a lot of money.
Also, did they put this hardened rail in other places on the system? I haven't heard of these problems on other UP lines as much as this one.  As mentioned earlier from someone who is working on the mountain every day, "this rail might work in an area that is static, but right now it doesn't seem to be working very well on Tehachapi". 

To answer one of your questions rails starting breaking as soon as temps got into the thirties and forties a few weeks ago. As the foreman was saying this batch of rail "doesn't seem up to the task of staying together under the weight of heavy tonnage on a moving roadbed". 
It makes sense to me! There are probley a number of factors that UP might need to address, and some of them may have been in the installation of track! I guess time will tell the quality.



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 10/14/19 08:14 by Fiftyfooter.

callum_out Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> So Evraz couldn't produce rail for Tehachapi that
> BNSF uses system wide? There's a cost
> saving hiding here somewhere and Japan was part of
> all that dumping controversy.

Am I correct, Evraz in Pueblo, CO, is the Russian Company that took over CF&I and what was left of the Colorado & Wyoming Ry.?  

Fall rail breaks have always been common over Tehachapi as the daytimes temperatures remain warm and the night temperatures drop low.  The wide spread in temperatures is tough on rail leading to breaks.  One fall Saturday I was up there in the early 2000s resulted in three different breaks.  

Todd Clark
Canyon Country, CA
Trainorders.com

It's that time of the year. Last Thursday morning, had three breaks between Winslow and Belen. Not sure where our Transcon steel came from either. Still, Mother Nature makes no exceptions.

The owners of Evraz steel are very connected. Close enough to Vladimir Putin that they made a so-called sanctions list.

https://nationalpost.com/news/world/owners-of-western-canadas-biggest-steel-company-on-u-s-treasurys-new-putin-list

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