Railroad Bed Collecting: Slag, Minerals, Rocks, and Meteorites

hi this is Thomas Farley of Southwest rockhounding calm Southwest rockhounding calm I pointed to the railroad tracks in my last video you can't kill legally collect on an active railroad line but you'll find rocks scattered in the desert nearby and I found this material nearby that confused me quite a bit but I'm glad I found it because it answers a number of questions this has some nice flow lines which I can describe later this material is quite drawn to a magnet so it's iron rich this is slag this is a byproduct of smelting operations in which heat and other chemicals and minerals are used to extract a commodity like you might have a silver smelting operation to get silver out of the parent rock or you could have a copper smelting operation much more common the smelters years ago you could have smelting going on and waste byproduct like this as a result of a steel making plant so smelting what's going on all over the country at different locations and this used commonly as batt commonly used as ballast in railroad tracks so it could come from almost anywhere but should come from a source fairly close by the thing that I've always read about slag is that it's often confused for meteorites so let's look at the differences here these are two iron stone meteorites and they're also attracted to the magnet the chief difference is that slag here if you have you think you have a meteorite and it's displaying these still pinholes where gas escape these are vesicles the stone meteorites will not have that so these are not going to have any vesicles confused by the term vesicles this is basalt vesicular basalt that refers to the texture this is what a lot of people think of is lava rock this actually has peridot in here so that's the difference between a big difference between slag slag is practically everywhere people find it everywhere and they often think it's a meteorite this was let's get back to those flow line this flow line is an interesting texture if you can see it the geologists might call that under this name it's Hawaiian I won't even try to pronounce it but that's the kind of texture and so people may be collecting slag I don't know but you would have a variety of different materials and interesting looking flow lines so the other thing that came with it is this this is probably basalt again volcanic rock with a porphyritic porphyritic texture which means large crystals most basalt more like this fine-grained this has more feldspar showing this probably cooled at a slower rate allowing the crystals to develop you can also have it's another example this is rhyolite porphyritic rhyolite so again porphyritic Riefler refers to these large crystals so it'd be interesting in the railroad line where this came from you can also have besides slag you can have just a mineral used old-time railroad tracks might have used just a a mineral this might look like a rock but it's actually just one thing this is comes from Bisbee Arizona on my friend Rolf the mineral delight collect there down there and dealer 1887 Bisbee or from Fairbanks Arizona railroad bed hematite variety tour guide so if you're a mineral collector or even just a rock collector investigating old abandoned railroad beds might be a good idea what else do we have Oh so we've covered slag and we've covered minerals used as road ballast and then we've looked at rock so again many things to investigate as long as you're not on an active railroad line thanks

Channel: Thomas Farley

Views: 7,194

Rating: 4.8333335 out of 5

Keywords: rocks, railroads, slag, collecting, minerals, old railroad beds

Id: cbLJPvalCi0

Length: 5min 29sec (329 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 28 2019