Pittsburgh & Ohio Valley Railway

From 1899 to January 31, 1994, the Pittsburgh & Ohio Valley Railway (P&OV) switched the east end of Neville Island: first as American Steel & Wire's plant railroad, last as Shenango's. HART Railroad's Pittsburgh & Chartiers Valley Division is its successor, and this page collects what is known about the P&OV's jobs, track names, moves, and equipment.

Nearly everything here comes from the @pittsburghohiovalleyrailroad Tumblr blog kept by Mark Connolly, a P&OV trainman and engineer from 1977 to 1991. Each "p." reference is a page of the blog's PDF export and links to the original post, where the photos are. The crew and their stories are in Voices of the P&OV.

P&OV at a glance

The P&OV switched Neville Island for 94 years, from 1899 to 1994. It began as American Steel & Wire's plant railroad and ended as Shenango's. In 1923 it had 2.04 miles of main track and connected with the P&LE and the PC&Y.

The blog does not say when control passed from U.S. Steel to Shenango. By the 1960s P&OV crews were in the Shenango pension plan (p.11, p.119).

The jobs

The only place the blog lists every job is Mark Connolly's answer to modeler Steve Raque, who asked what the numbers meant and what each job did (p.2). Mark said the number stood for the shift and the duty. There were five numbered jobs and an EXTRA. Two were daylight jobs with different work. The others were the second trick, the midnight trick, and a relief job that covered the days those jobs had off. Photo captions supply the moves.

Read across the week, the relief job sits in the holes Mark named. Monday and Tuesday midnight, #115 covers the nights #305 has off. Wednesday afternoon, it covers the second trick #205 has off. Saturday and Sunday, it is the daylight crew, when both #105 and #110 are off. The blog does not say who worked Thursday's second trick.

A trainmaster wrote the switching orders for the crew on duty (p.76). Weighing belonged to the yard clerks and the trainmasters, at the Toledo scale in the yard office (p.95).

#105, the ore job

This was the job men wanted. Daylight, Monday through Friday, 7:00 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., mostly in the West Yard. Mark called it the clean end of the plant, and the senior men held it (p.2, p.105).

The work was iron ore for Shenango. The crew shoved ten-car drags off the South Runner to the car dumper. The brakeman was supposed to ride the fifth car (p.84). At the dumper the hoppers were turned on E2, and a car rider rode the empties back down the hill, braking by hand (p.39, p.44). Captions show the drag coming up to the coke yard switch, and the engine spotted for fuel in the South Yard between trips (p.114, p.58).

Coffee belonged to the day. Don Amber and Bob Paulin drank it near the coke plant lead, in the green P&OV hats (p.105). After a drag to the dumper, around 10:00 or 10:30, the crew stopped at the millwrights on the furnace lead and brought coffee back for the yard office (p.57). An early quit at the end of the shift was something to smile about (p.75). A crew coming on duty would sometimes step onto the footboard, relieve the engineer, and weigh the cars or take one more drag, so the crew going home could leave a little early (p.55).

In the early 1980s the engine on this job was SW9 #4 (p.37). Nick Niapas conducted it, and sometimes the furnace job as well (p.9).

#110, the furnace job

The other daylight job, Monday through Friday, on the east end. Mark called it a graphite and coke dust area. It served the two blast furnaces, the pig machine, and the coke plant (p.2). John Doubt worked it often enough that a caption names it the Furnace Job (p.139, p.57).

Furnace coke was pulled from the Shenango coke plant, weighed on the yard-office scale, and taken to F1 at the blast furnace. The furnace job lined the crossing for that move, and the conductor rode the lead hopper (p.130, p.120, p.55). While B furnace finished a cast, the crew waited at the rear of the furnace runner, short of the bumping block (p.14).

The ladle, pig, and barge moves below are described on this east-end territory. The captions do not repeat the job number on every one of them.

Hot metal moved in ladles, switched two at a time out of the ladle house. The crew had to watch the weight or the cut would reach the quench car at the battery (p.14). Ladles were heated on E9 before they were spotted, and switched from E6 to E4 because they were rarely in the order the furnace wanted (p.77, p.91). Mark's split was one to the foundry, one to the pig machine, and one for recast (p.138). Iron for the Shenango foundry, at the other end of the island, left by the pig-yard lead at the Gulf Crossing. The PC&Y interchange was just west of that crossing, and crews bled the ladles and gons there (p.138, p.105).

At the A-furnace pig machine, bars dropped into gondolas two loads at a time. The crew pulled those two loads and kept the safety car clear of the East Runner (p.110). Loads of pig iron were spotted on E1 for the barge, on a steep grade (p.95). Empty pig gons were picked up in the East Yard, near West View Water (p.92).

#115, the relief job

Mark lists five shifts, and the trick changes with the day: Monday and Tuesday midnight, Wednesday on the second trick, Saturday and Sunday daylight (p.2). It covered the rest days of the other jobs, east or west as that day's work required.

In August 1979 Larry Obusek had SW9 #6 on this job, with Joe Adamcik on the front of the engine, about to roll across the scale. Mark thought the scale had been thrown red (p.126). Elmer Picard worked the relief job as well as the steady second-trick job (p.67).

#205, second trick

4:00 p.m. to midnight, off Wednesday and Thursday, working the east end and the west end as the plant required (p.2). Elmer Picard held it as a steady job. He came to work in a sport coat and tie, and Mark said he looked like he owned the place when he filled out his time sheet (p.67). The blog gives this trick no separate list of moves.

#305, the midnight job

Midnight to 7:00 a.m., off Monday and Tuesday, east and west (p.2). The one task a caption names is the last one. The crew spotted the engine on S9 for sand and went home. In a 1980 photo that engine is #3, just west of the scale, with the track gang loading sand by the bucket (p.99).

EXTRA

An extra was called when the plant was super busy, or when the scale was down (p.2). The men who covered it were the extra board, and a call could be a long time coming. Scott Morrison was third out most of the time (p.72). Asked in 1988 why railroad employees were not guaranteed 40 hours a week, John Iwanonkiw answered that they had spent those years on the extra board (p.62).

The two east-end furnaces

The two furnaces next to the coke plant are Shenango blast furnaces A and B. They are the iron works on the east end of the island. The Shenango-Penn foundry is a different plant, about two miles west, at 3100 Grand Avenue. Stanley Quick, who spent 38 years at Shenango, put the foundry where the main road bends, a small works compared with the coke plant, and connected to it by rail.

Ore and furnace coke went to A and B. The foundry took the hot iron those furnaces cast, in ladles. A P&OV engine worked that ladle job at the foundry. The PC&Y interchange, just west of the Gulf Crossing, is where ladles and gons changed roads on the way off the east-end plant.

What the railroad brought in

Iron ore came onto the island over the PC&Y. A PC&Y man recalled hauling it out of Scully Yard. On the island, #105 shoved it from the West Yard to the Shenango car dumper in ten-car drags. A 1980 photo taken from the dumper looks back across the ore yard with both furnaces standing behind it (p.38). The dumper trestle also looked out on a stockyard of ore, coal, dolomite, and coke (p.108).

Furnace coke moved the other way. #110 pulled it from the battery, weighed it at the yard-office scale, and took it to track F1 at the blast furnace. The furnace job lined the crossing for that move.

Where A and B sat

The captions give a view, not a survey.

The Furnace Runner runs east past the pig machine at A furnace and ends at a bumping block. Crews waited there while B finished a cast (p.14, p.120). When A was being cut up for scrap, the gons sat on the old pig-iron holding track, the East Runner was to the right, and B was still standing in the background (p.60). A is the near furnace, the one with the pig machine. B is the one beyond it.

Hot metal left the ladle house two ladles at a time. Mark's split was one to the foundry, one to the pig machine, and one for recast. At A's pig machine the bars dropped into gondolas two loads at a time, and the loads were spotted on E1 for the barge.

How the pair got there, and when it left

The first stack is the American Steel & Wire furnace of about 1900. The company history Mark posted says that when Davison bought it from U.S. Steel it was a 550-ton-a-day furnace on 159 acres at the upstream end of the island. Davison enlarged it, built the coke plant to feed it, and built the cement plant to use the slag. The pig iron was sold to foundries in the Pittsburgh district (p.116).

In 1951 Pittsburgh Coke & Chemical raised money to double pig-iron output from 300,000 to 600,000 net tons a year. That program is the second furnace, which EPA dates to about 1952. In 1958 the company spent about $2.5 million to adapt one of the two furnaces to make ferromanganese and spiegeleisen as well as pig iron. Half of that money was a gas-cleaning system. The published note does not say whether the converted furnace was A or B.

Shenango Furnace bought the coke-and-iron works in 1962 and kept both stacks. A came down first and stayed in place while B kept running. Stanley Quick describes the shutdowns as staged. Mark's scrap photo is the same moment: A going out, B still up. The last casts at B were around 1990. The foundry closed in January 1990. The iron department closed over 1990–91, and the pig machine was sold and rebuilt at Sparrows Point. After that the east end was a coke plant. HART's Shenango map is that later plant: tracks K-1 and K-2 at the coke works. The ore dumper, furnaces A and B, the pig machine, the ladle house, and the ladle run to the foundry are not on it.

The longer corporate history is in Neville Island coke, cement, and chemical history.

Track and place names

The P&OV's three yards (West, South and East) already share their names with HART's station maps. Its scale also sat just east of S9 at the yard office, which matches HART's scale on the South Yard west lead. Track numbers seem to carry a yard prefix (E = East, S = South, F = furnace; C is unclear). That is inferred from the captions, not stated.

Yards and buildings

Running tracks

Numbered tracks and switches

Industry and interchange spots

Typical moves

Almost every P&OV car crossed the yard office scale. The traffic was mostly Shenango's own: ore in, hot metal and pig iron around the island, and coke from the battery to the furnace. The job write-ups above tell that work by crew. This table is the same traffic, one row per move.

Locomotives, equipment, and crew roles

By the late 1970s the P&OV ran green diesel switchers numbered 3 to 6, with SW9s #4 and #6 doing most of the work. Heavy repairs were done at the P&LE shops in McKees Rocks.

Other identity details: green paint and a round P&OV herald (p.139); green crew hats (p.105); radio 161.160 MHz listed as P&OV General (p.94); a modeler's "what if" 50-foot P&OV boxcar exists (p.4).

Crew roles seen in the blog:

• Trainmaster: wrote switching orders and weighed cars (p.76, p.95)
• Yard clerk: walked the yard knocking on cars to tell loads from empties, and weighed cars (p.31, p.80)
• Conductor, brakeman and engineer: the switch crew; the brakeman rode the cut (p.84)
• Car rider: rode strings of cars down from the dumper, braking by hand (p.44)
• Car knocker: car inspector and repairer (p.37)
• Track gang / gandydancers: maintenance of way, based at the shed by S1 (p.99, p.100)
• Extra board: junior men waiting for work (p.62, p.72)

Still unknown

• When did control of the P&OV pass from U.S. Steel to Shenango?
• What were the models of #3 and #5, and were there units before #3?
• Where exactly was S1 compared with S9, and how many S and E tracks were there?
• What does the "C" in the C9 switch stand for?
• p.83 says Shenango sold the Neville plant to Dravo two years after buying it in 1939. Which plant was that?
• Is Calgon Carbon descended from Pittsburgh Coke & Chemical's 1942 activated-carbon plant? This comes from memory and still needs a source.
• Did Kosmos Cement take over the Marquette Cement plant on the East Runner?
• Which stack was the 1952 furnace, and which one was adapted for ferromanganese in 1958? No hearth diameter or surveyed furnace-track map has turned up.

Sources

• @pittsburghohiovalleyrailroad Tumblr blog by Mark Connolly, exported to PDF (142 pages); page numbers in this article refer to that PDF and link to the original posts.
• Decisions of the Interstate Commerce Commission, Vol. 130, pp. 659–661: P&OV valuation as of Jun 30, 1919 (quoted on p.136)
• "Railroad History, Pittsburgh Plan," 1923: P&OV entry (quoted on p.120 and p.142)
• Pittsburgh Coke & Chemical company history (quoted on p.116)
• Hugh Gorman, "Manufacturing Brownfields: The Case of Neville Island, Pennsylvania," Technology and Culture 38, no. 3 (Jul 1997): 539–574 (cited on p.21)
• Cia Tatone and Dan Holland, Neville Island (book; cited on p.35)
• New York Times, 6 July 1951: the rights offering that doubled Neville Island pig iron from 300,000 to 600,000 net tons a year. Portal scan: Pittsburgh Coke & Chemical doubles pig iron.
• U.S. EPA, Shenango Incorporated, Neville Island: 1962 purchase, ovens about 1930, second blast furnace about 1952. epa.gov
• Chemical & Engineering News, 17 February 1958, "Pittsburgh Coke Branches Out": one Neville Island furnace adapted for ferromanganese and spiegeleisen, about $2.5 million.
• Dennis DeBruler, "Neville Island, PA: Shenango Steel Works," Towns and Nature, 17 October 2022, including Stanley Quick on A coming down before B, and on the foundry two miles west. towns-and-nature.blogspot.com