New British Steel Rail Stocking Facility Will Boost Network Rail Supply Chain
The title of this post, is the same as that of this article on RailUK.
These four paragraphs outline the new facility and how it will work.
British Steel is building a new £10 million rail stocking facility, the biggest of its kind in the country.
The facility, at the company’s Scunthorpe site, is scheduled to be completed this summer and will stock around 25,000 tonnes of 108-metre finished rail.
The investment is part of our British Steel’s strategy to support the supply of 56E1 and 60E2 section rails for Network Rail, ensuring there is rail stock readily available for its supply chain.
Rails stocked in the new facility will all have undergone the stringent testing and quality assurance checks required to meet the specification to allow immediate dispatch or welding into 216-metre lengths to the customer.
With all the gloom in the steel industry, It’s good to see someone investing in new facilities.
The Anonymous Widower 
Agreed this seems like a good plan.
After privatization, years ago, we had rail crew members telling us that they went from their previous process of ordering up “a shiny new rail”
to be told that they had to go to a failed old rail in the yard and cut off a “good section” to patch in.
they had the impression that this was not because the supply of rails had dried up…….
Hopefully this is a sign that shiny new rails are in fashion again!
Comment by David Collier | January 25, 2024 |
In the late 1960s, the section I worked in at ICI in Runcorn, had developed a differential infra-red analyser to measure traces of one chemical in another. One was designed to measure water in methyl methacrylate, which is the monomer, used to make Perspex. It could measure parts per million of water in the stream and in other streams, it could even do it, if the stream was dirty, with a lot of something like carbon black.
The light from an infra-red source was split into two different frequencies and the beams were passed through quartz-windowed cells in the pipe carrying the stream of chemicals. One measured the infra-red spectrum at a point where water could be measured and the other measured the methyl methacrylate.
These analysers were the first time, I’d seen integrated circuits and they were used to calculate the level of water in methyl methacrylate.
A complicated analyser like this needs protection as on a chemical plant, there are often stacker trucks and other small heavy trucks being driven about, with not always due care and attention. So it was encased in a steel dome to and the whole instrument was put together on a two metre section of steel C-section beam, which was then machined flat to form an accurate optical bench for the delicate instrument. The steel was then painted.
The first instruments had used new steel beams, but when the supplier heard how they were being used, he suggested something better. At the back of the yard he had some very old beams, where all the steel had crystallised out and he said they would be better over the long term. By the time, I joined the section, they were only only using old beams.
So perhaps old rails may be just as tough.
Comment by AnonW | January 25, 2024 |