General Steel Industries - Expansion

Expansion

In 1948, the company's headquarters was moved from Eddystone to Granite City. In the mid-1950s, the company expanded its focus from steel castings products to a more diversified company through an acquisition program that included purchasing National Roll & Foundry Company in 1955, St. Louis Car Company in June 1960, Ludlow-Saylor Wire Cloth, Flex-O-Lite, Standard Pipeprotection, and Simplicity Engineering Corporation. Standard Pipeprotection Division was created from a series of acquisitions.

Recognizing the company had grown beyond its original business of manufacturing steel castings, the company officially changed its name to General Steel Industries, Incorporated on May 1, 1961. The company's first two plants, the Eddystone plant and the Granite City plant, the acquired Commonwealth Steel facility, became the Castings Division and both plants continued to produce large steel castings. For example, in 1961 the Eddystone plant provided 85% of the steel castings used in the Union Electric Company's new Taum Sauk hydroelectric power station near St. Louis and produced railroad specialty products such as "the world's highest capacity flat car", weighing almost 75 tons, with a load limit of 300 tons. The Granite City plant produced "engineered cast steel specialty products" for the railroad industry including one-piece locomotive beds, one-piece cast steel flat car underframes and wear-resistant manganese steel casting, used in mining and crushing equipment and heavy-duty power shovels. In the 1950s, the company, then as General Steel Castings, introduced the Commonwealth 53' 6" flatcar that became one of the railroad industry's most commonly used flatcars during the 1950s and 1960s. This flatcar remained in production, with only minor changes, into the early 1970s.

At the Granite City plant, General Steel x-rayed uranium ingots for the Atomic Energy Commission from 1958 through 1966 using two U.S. Government-owned Allis-Chalmers betatrons (Magnetic Induction Electron Accelerators) apparatuses on loan to the company. The betatrons were still at the plant in late 1992 "in a building on the southern section of the plant property" and the contamination from the use of the betatrons was determined to be "highly localized, confined to a few areas, and contained inside an unused building." The building "had residual radioactive contamination until remediation in 1993."

As a defense contractor, the company manufactured cast armor hulls and turrets for the U.S. Army M-60 medium tanks, produced at both Granite City and Eddystone, as part an $8 million contract awarded by Chrysler Corporation in 1961.