Jock Ellis Cumming, GA US of A Georgia Association of Railroad Passengers
If we ever have to produce steel to fight I fear that we will not have the ability to meet our needs.
Ive gone into steel mills to get coil out and they are of good quality if not the best. To have foreign steel come into the USA really hurts us as a Nation although it might be cheaper to use.
I remember the facility in Sparrows. It was not much when we traveled it to learn driving big rigs 20 years ago and is probably even less if at all now.
WOW another steel furnace gone .
AK Steels (Armco) Ashland ,Ky site appears to be tearing down one of their two furnaces.
I'm sure it's the Amanda furnace.This use to be called The American Rolling Company I think.I've had family work and retire at this site. Here's a link to see the Armco site in Ashland. http://www.coalcampusa.com/rustbelt/ky/ky.htm
Collin ,operator of the " Eastern Kentucky & Ohio R.R."
rji2: You hit it exactly right.....Jobs...!! In the city of Johnstown, Pa. with the mills going full blast I see visions in my memory of hundreds of workers at shift time downtown in the city, as the mills were just at the edge of the business district...Workers arriving downtown via streetcar to head into the mills for their shift, etc...Just bustling with busyness....Middle class workers making good money....buying products....{most at that time, made in USA}....
One could see the light in the sky from the blast furnaces at night from 20 some miles distant. No the mills were not pretty....far from it, but they sure were producing wages for our workers. Powerful times for American workers. Much of it dormant, silent now, rusting away....Some one in a 3rd world country {that we no doubt help set up}, doing something similar to produce steel now and then their government "dumping" it back into our country at prices no one here can compete....
Quentin
While the steel industry in the vibrancy of full production was never any beauty queen, in death with shut down facilities it has the appearance of doom on earth....returning to to the rust from which it originally rose. Having passed the rusting facilities around Steelton, Youngstown, Warren and Pittsburgh it is hard to imagine the nighttime light shows those mills produced as one passed them during their heyday.
By the same token, driving through Akron and not smelling the making of rubber tires is a sad commentary on the state of industrial America.
Never too old to have a happy childhood!
....It's sad to read of mammoth Bethlehem Steel structures being demolished to be gone forever.
Being originally from near the Johnstown area and old enough to have seen all that complex under full production with all the sounds and smoke and railroad action around the grounds....and so on.....It's sad to understand what it once was and what it is not now....Hard to accept. At one time, it was America at work....and during the war years it did it's part to ensure we would have the material to win the fight....Which of course we did.
The Johnstown complex is mostly silent now....Still lots of it standing to remind us that lived in that era what was once done there....Proudly done.....
The intertwined history of the technological development of the steel industry and the creation of viable railroads is losing an important milemarker. A sad epitaph that in some way seems timely as manufacturing in many examples seems to have caught the last southbound train never to return. Bethlehem Steel for many in my generation was the visible muscle in the strong independant commerce of another generation...
http://www.robertjohndavis.com/blog/
Nothing is more fairly distributed than common sense: no one thinks he needs more of it than he already has.
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