FRUGALITY ON THE RAILROAD.

One place you surely don't want Chinese Distressed Material is in the track structure.

From its very beginnings, the B&O Railroad kept as much work as possible in-house. It became part of the railroad’s very DNA to be able to make almost anything it needed, even as it fully participated in the larger railway supply market.

In the late 1970s, the B&O still made many of its own bridges at Martinsburg. It sorted, straightened, and re-kegged track spikes, re-threaded track bolts, and otherwise reclaimed anything work trains could pick up and drag back to the yard.

The system scale shop was there, along with the system track maintenance machinery shop. Martinsburg made signs, had a full carpentry shop, and a blacksmith shop with heavy drop hammer straight out of the late 19^th century.

The heart of the operation was the Frog & Switch Shop. A few dozen men using a dozen muscular, early 20^thcentury specialized machine tools manufactured new switches, diamonds, special track work, and anything else required to keep railroad wheels where they needed to be.

When model railroaders scratchbuild, they're simply emulating the prototype.  When prototypes scratchbuild, they don't want Distressed Material, from China or from Youngstown.

In the late 1970s, steel was a bit of a problem. Chessie generally used a “rail bound” frog assembly. The frog is the complex, built-up assembly that allows flanged wheels to cross over rails. The switch points guide the wheels down one path or the other. Guard rails help keep wheels on their proper paths. But the frog is the very heart of the switch, literally and figuratively.

The heart of the frog was a heavy manganese steel casting, to which the switch builders bolted wing rails. Martinsburg shaped and planed regular running rail pieces, heated them in furnaces, then formed the rails into the precise shape to mate with the casting. It was an impressive operation.

Manganese steel exhibits a property called “work hardening.” Basically, every time a wheel rolls over it, the surface of the metal gets a tiny bit harder. The stress of the wheel causes minute changes in the microstructure of the steel, making it slightly more resistant to wear. That principle had been well-understood for decades.

Chessie was an early railroad adopter of a technique known as “explosive surface deformation,” among other terms. Basically, a technician would apply a thin (1/8” to ¼”) sticky layer of plastic explosive to the surface of the rail or frog to be hardened. The stuff obviously needed to be handled with care, but it was not like nitroglycerin. It was fired by an electrical charge.

There would be a bright flash, a loud bang, and that was it. It was an extremely controlled explosion meant to artificially work harden the surface wherever the layer of explosive tightly touched the steel. It gave the surface a bit of texture, but most importantly created a layer of harder and more wear resistant steel atop a core casting that remained resilient and more ductile. It was a bit like case hardening.

Chessie was buying cast manganese frog inserts by the hundreds from U.S. suppliers—and having unacceptably high failure rates. When the railroad “shot” the frogs (the casual term for the process), too many of the castings cracked or warped and had to be scrapped. It seemed clear that U.S. mills were not interested in, or capable of, a reasonable level of quality control.

So Chessie looked east.

Beginning in the late 1970s, the castings arriving from foundries in Japan proved to be superior to the domestic versions. I recall hearing discussions about the Japanese inserts having better dimensional control, needing less machining for fit up, and having a far lower rejection rate after being shot. Think about the state of the U;S. steel industry four decades ago.

Particularly, considering that manganese steel is also used in battleship armour.  (I wonder if a battleship is also tougher after it's been hit a few times.)

The story, however, is really about what happened when Martinsburg area environmentalists got worried about Baltimore and Ohio shooting frogs.  Read and enjoy.