USED STEEL RAIL SCRAP

This is our own little horror story that turned out well.

What began as a locomotive rigging job morphed into a very extensive project. The company we were contracted to had this "little" project on the side and asked if we might be able to arrange the trucking of 2,000,000 lbs of used steel rail. Sure, no problem. They wanted a fixed price per load due to cost constraints. And, we figured since they were in charge of the project, i.e. loading and unloading that a fixed price rather than time and materials shouldn't be a problem if we placed limits on the time for loading and offloading and they committed to at least 3 truckloads per day per truck. Wellll.. Life should be so good.

It turned out - it took more than 5 hours and a busted LED trailer light to get the first truck LOADED and the folk we were contracted to for hauling the rail were not in charge of loading nor were they in charge of tearing out and stacking the rail in preparation for loading. Further, the trailer looks like pixie sticks rather than a nice neat load. SO, it takes an additional hour and a half to unload it, after a 3 hour drive. Oh, my... 9 1/2 hrs for one load, one way. This is one very teed off trucker and rightfully so. I can't say I'm very happy at this point either.

Ok - I can get the trucker calmed down because I'm guaranteeing his daily no matter how many loads he does and, after all he's family. We discuss this with the powers that be and figure maybe this is just a shakedown cruise, so we'll go ahead and try a few more loads over the weekend to see if everyone can improve their performance and make this a cost effective deal.

The next morning - no one's onsite for loading. Where the hell are they! Ok, round 'em up. 4 1/2 hours later the truck is loaded, again like pixie sticks. Because of our early start we are still able to get 2 loads delivered but it was a 14 hour day. Things are not really looking up.

Our client does not want to pay for another trailer to be spotted onsite for loading purposes to improve turn around time, saying it's the other guys problem . The finger pointing begins and I'm stuck in the middle. I dig an extra trailer up and have it dropped at the site to be loaded for pickup in the morning, anyway.

We get there in the morning and the trailer is not loaded. What is going on here? We take a walk down the track and here's this skidsteer stuck up to its axles. No one in sight. It turns out "they" did try to load the trailer the night before but got it stuck.

Who are "they"? We soon refer to them as "the kids".

It turns out "the kids" who's parents own the rail and timbers have never done a project before this one. They have one little skidsteer and are lifting rail with it (can you say bent!) and are trying to load the truck one rail stick at a time. Wow.. God Bless 'em their hearts in the right place and they're hard workers (except when they decide it's too hot or they need to go play with their buddies). After all - these are "kids", at least to all of us grizzled, old guys.

We offer the rental of our bucket loader along with forks, but no that's not in "the kids" budget. Eventually they do rent an all terrain forklift, so at least the truck can get loaded in a more timely fashion. We teach them how to properly stack rail for loading and how to properly load a trailer - no more pixie sticks. But, this project is well behind schedule and I can't keep trucks and trailers waiting around at their convenience. We really are nice guys, but I'm not going to fund their project at my expense, thank you very much. "The kids" have no idea even what a spike puller is, much less where to get one. They have been pulling spikes by hand, pry bar and skidsteer.

To make a very long story short, in the end we took over "the kids" side of the project accomplishing in days what took them weeks. We pulled the used rail (without bending it all up) stacked, loaded and transported it to our client. Strictly, speaking we now have 2 clients. We spotted roll-offs for cleaning up of the associated "jewelry" (the various small pieces used to tye rail together and down to the timbers). Although, some of this was left behind because neither side wanted to pay for a magnet in order to do a complete cleaning.

So, the job was completed. We didn't lose money and both clients were the better off for our intervention.

We hope you enjoyed our little story. We didn't for awhile, there.

Do You Have Used Scrap Rail?

1) We would like to bid on its removal.

2) If you already have a buyer, we would like to act as your project manager overseeing its removal.

3) We certainly want to bid on transporting it.

4) We will consider all phases, inluding the dirt work for laying a new line.

Please, visit our Home page for more information on what we do.