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Thursday, June 13, 2013

Moving a 100 Ton Stationary Steam Engine


The part that got me was the 'one thousand horsepower'. Sounds impressive until you compare it to the weight. A modern car car easily have 200 horsepower, five cars would not even weigh ten tons, much less 100 tons. On the other hand, a car is not going to be able to run day-in and day-out for fifty years. At first I wondered why they were moving this thing at all. The steel mill where they found it is probably dead, why not just restore it in place? Then I realized the site is probably owned by a corporation, a steel corporation that is struggling to stay alive, and probably doesn't have any room in it's hard corporate heart for any kind of do-gooding. We can get a dollar and half for the metal if we scrap it? That's a dollar and a half more than we had this morning, scrap it!
    This video is from 2009, and they have made some progress since then, but like any volunteer organization, Youngstown Steel Heritage Foundation always needs help. You can read more here, or watch more videos here.
    I guess I have a bit of a soft spot for the Ohio steel industry, after all I did spend 8 years there, and while I was never directly involved in the steel industry, I was certainly in thrall to the automobile, and the two have been marching hand in hand from the beginning. Ohio was never the big steel center like Detroit was, but we did have our own little successes. There was the steel railroad bridge that burned down in Cleveland when the Cuyahoga River caught fire, and for a while Steubenville, (50 miles South of Youngstown), had the dirtiest air in the country.
    Video link from Scott.


1 comment:

Ole Phat Stu said...

I did a double take, snorting coffee into the keyboard, about 3 seconds in, when the narrator ostensibly said "My name is RickRollin' " ;-)