HN has reached some kind of wonderful critical mass when it gets such a well-informed comment about steel production almost instantly after the post appears. Thanks for an answer that radically changed my view of the original post. My life is complete.
I'm just old. I lived in Cleveland when it looked like this.[1] City streets ran through the steel mills. Switch engines pulled short trains of red-hot ingots on tracks on city streets. You could see the ingots make the trip from caster to rolling mill. In a steel town, everybody knows the basic process.
