Steel Train Dumping Liquid Molten Slag

The steel making process produces the waste by-product of slag.

In this clip, the Bethlehem Steel Works shows how it’s done! Taking the slag from the steel mill on special “slag cars” which act as giant ladles and dumping the contents into the slag pit.

The slag cars generally have two ladles (or buckets) per car and are dumped electronically. The temperature of the slag is extremely hot and often still measures over 600 degrees 24 hours later.

As you can see in this video, a large crane is used to tap the remaining contents of each ladle after it is dumped to get the cooled shell out of the car. The slag spreads out looking like a beautiful lava flow. Each ladle holds approximately 2900 gallons of slag.

A switcher engine is usually all that is needed to haul these loads.

In this case, an EMD SW7 with 1200 horse power is most likely the beast of burden in this inhospitable environment.

If you have ever worked around this kind of environment or have seen this personally, please share your comments with our community!
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