Railway Track & Structures - January 2009 - (Page 34)

RAIL REPORT provements to our head-hardening machine deliver greater surface hardness and, more importantly, greater depth of hardness. This provides customers with a product that will have a longer rail life and greater resistance to rolling contact fatigue. We also updated the controls to our treatment process to deliver increasingly consistent results and reduce variability, ultimately improving product quality and, most importantly, customer satisfaction.” Wirick continued: “Demonstrating the ArcelorMittal core value of Quality, we continue to evaluate further improvements to our reheating and rolling processes at our Steelton facility and are fortunate that as part of the world’s largest steel producer our resources include research and development capabilities of unparalleled scale. This includes four sister rail operations that we learn from while also sharing best practices and technical expertise. Rather than lose time from a limited perspective, our internal information-sharing process delivers expedited change that is meaningful to our customers.” product for those customers that have applications that fit the intermediate hardness performance range. These customers will experience a product that has improved weldability, improved ductility, strength and hardness at depth. “As an extension of the work on our new intermediate hardness rail, we are also currently evaluating several metallurgical approaches that should result in a significant improvement in our premium rail offering. This work is focused on maintaining the good depth of hardness we offer in these products, but with improvements in weldability and fatigue performance,” he said. “We believe that there are situations occurring in track in which the rail surface fails by a fatigue mechanism resulting in field grinding by our customers. The grinding process reduces the life of the rail and results in increased life-cycle costs for our customers. “In 2008, we improved the nondestructive inspection of our products by incorporating electromagnetic inspection capabilities in our inspection program,” Hylton noted. “The use of EMI will permit an improved surface inspection over that of conventional ultrasonics which we employ for finding imperfections below the rail surface.” of some shape sizes on to Mill 2 will provide consistent rail production capabilities at Mill 1 as we move into 2009 and beyond. “We continue to examine the potential for increasing our finished rail length beyond the current 240 feet and increasing the standard rail hardness that we provide to the rail industry,” he said. “Also, an important recent addition to the rail mill complex is our new Continuous Welded Rail plant, which will allow us to weld 240-foot SDI rails, as well as shorter rails from other suppliers. “A new continuous caster will be operational early in 2009, allowing us to cast a slightly larger rail bloom that will enhance the over all quality of our finished rails, “Kotsenas pointed out. “The Steel Dynamics, Inc., joint venture company located at our rail mill complex, Dynamic Composites, LLC, is fully operational and is supplying composite crossties for industrial applications and several main line railroad evaluations,” he said. “Regarding the ongoing rail market we are encouraged by the overall stability that continues to be expressed by the national and international railroad industry,” Kotsenas said. “We’re very optimistic that the hard lessons learned by deferring physical plant maintenance won’t be repeated in the future and rail maintenance and capital programs will continue on a steady pace. Obviously, the general economic environment will be a major factor in future expenditures, especially with the Class 1 railroads that depend on metals, coal, automotive, and import/export revenues. Much will depend on the effectiveness of the incoming administration and the federal transportation budgets it puts forward.” Evraz Rocky Mountain Steel “We continue to work on improving the depth of hardness and fatigue performance of our intermediate and premium rail products to continue to meet the demands of the Class 1 community,” said Timothy Hylton, Ph.D., director, technical services for Evraz Rocky Mountain Steel, A Division of Evraz Inc., NA. “We have been working with several North American customers as we have progressed in the development of our new intermediate hardness rail product in 2008. We anticipate field trials to be conducted in 2009 with several customers. We are excited to be offering an improved Steel Dynamics “Through this past year, we have successfully brought our new medium section rolling mill (Mill 2) on board at Columbia City, Ind.,” said Paul Kotsenas, rail and special products manger for Steel Dynamics Sales North America, Inc. “This rolling mill will take several WF shape sizes off our current heavy section mill (Mill 1), which is designed to roll a full range of standard tee rail sections. This shifting 34 Railway Track & Structures January 2009 www.rtands.com http://www.rtands.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Railway Track & Structures - January 2009

Railway Track & Structures - January 2009 Contents On Track Industry Today Supplier News AREMA News NRC News TTCI R&D Railroads Continue to Budget Major Capital Projects Battling Brush and other Vegetation Steel Mills Increasing Metallurgical Quality of Rail Steels Products and Literature People Calendar Advertisers Index Sales Representatives Website Directory Professional Directory Classified Advertising Chicago Perspective

Railway Track & Structures - January 2009

For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.