they’d start the fire and use the burning tree to wrap the steel rail around. Made it unusable basically, so the south couldn’t reassemble the tracks quickly.
I should say, the heat from the fire made the iron soft enough to bend around the tree. My previous post kind of screwed up the mechanics of it. Everything was done manually, and they didn’t have continuous rails like now days.
***they’d start the fire and use the burning tree to wrap the steel rail around. Made it unusable basically, so the south couldn’t reassemble the tracks quickly.
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From “The Horse Soldiers” (with John Wayne!)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLx5vAnmzms (from about :15 to :55)
The reason that the rails were heated and thrown into water was because it changed the temper of the iron and made it brittle, and also warped the rail.
🐷