When I was walking past the train tracks the other day, I found this laying on the ground. I thought it was kinda cool, so I picked it up. (This was ~20 feet from the tracks, I don’t think it’s important) I was just wondering why the workers might have taken this sliver of rail off? Whatever the reason, it definitely makes a cool trinket, and it’ll be on my workshop wall quite soon.

 

 

Mr. 511,

I am intrigued.

Would you please post a picture of the artifact that you found?

Thanks,

SLAG.

 

A bit of a fumble on my part, SLAG . I tried editing the post, but my upload speed is quite slow. It'll be fixed soon.

Mr. 511,

Copy that. Glad you're on it.

Looking forward to seeing it.

The   SLAG.

It looks like it has been lying on the ground for some time. Nice patina. It would have been a big job to cut off that piece of rail.

More than likely it was cut off to trim or square up the end of the rail if they were going to weld the rails together, it appears that it had a big flaw on the bottom flange.

Looks like an oxy-acet cut bobble to me rather than a pre-existing flaw.   Steven, can you look at it and tell us?

I would call that an oxy-fuel cut rough cut, that was then squared up with an abrasive chop saw.

That's what I meant by a flaw in the flange - they had to cut it off clean to square it up.

ok I have seen some rail that was misrolled with cold shuts.

When I visited the town museum in Manassas VA way back, '90's?,  they had examples of the different shapes ril had back before they standardized it.  Some a bit odd...

Some of the earliest rail - from Trevithicks Pennydaren Locomotive hauling slate in Wales in 1803 was like angle iron - the wheels were smooth and the rail had the flange!  There is a model of the locomotive in the Science Museum in London, and they have a full scale replica in Cardiff at the National Museum of Wales.  Really neat looking locomotive.

Did you visit Watt's workshop at the Science Museum in London?  Greatly depressed me as he revolutionized the world in a workshop less well equipped than the one I mess around in. I Like it there is still several hundred items in it that the Museum says they don't know what are...

Yes, sir.  Love that workshop.  Also the National Rail Museum in York.  Oh, and I love the beam engines at the Water and Steam Museum at Kew Bridge.

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I was just wondering why the workers might have taken this sliver of rail off?

It was most likely trimmed off a new section of rail being inserted into the existing track, ... or off an existing section, that needed to be "shortened"  in order to "set the gauge" of a curve in the track.

 

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Nobody else mentioned this, and it may be a moot point, but it's my understanding that the RR owns everything within a certain distance around the tracks.  I'd be surprised if anyone hassled you about that though, and if they did, I bet you could hand it back with a sneer and say something like, "Fine, you can have this piece of junk back" then and they'd let you go.

 

as always

peace and love

billyO

 

I have seen an old picture of 2 Guys cutting a rail with a hacksaw, blade looked about 24 inches long and the saw had about a 12" throat.

We went to a hammer-in up in Missouri a couple of years ago and one of the members had thin slivers of RR track just like that one that he had used a power hack saw to cut off the main rail. They were sold out in several minutes. One came home with us and resides out in the shop.