The Monongahela Connecting Railroad (reporting mark MCRR) or Mon Conn was a small industrial railroad in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, now part of the Allegheny Valley Railroad. It was a subsidiary of the Jones & Laughlin Steel Company and a large portion of its work was for its parent company, though it also served other industries along the line. The railroad is possibly best known for its hot metal bridge, which was used to carry molten iron across the Monongahela River from J&L's Eliza Furnaces to the Bessemer converters (later, open hearth furnaces) and rolling mills at J&L's South Side facility.
The railroad was also a dieselization pioneer, buying many early diesel locomotives from Alco, General Electric and other manufacturers.
The railroad is still in existence, but in much reduced form. The Monongahela River bridge has been converted to a two-lane automobile bridge, with the adjacent hot metal bridge converted for bicycles. The bridges are collectively called the Hot Metal Bridge. The railroad serves a few small industrial customers along the north/east (right downstream) bank of the river.
Famous quotes containing the words connecting and/or railroad:
“Mine was, as it were, the connecting link between wild and cultivated fields; as some states are civilized, and others half-civilized, and others savage or barbarous, so my field was, though not in a bad sense, a half-cultivated field. They were beans cheerfully returning to their wild and primitive state that I cultivated, and my hoe played the Ranz des Vaches for them.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The worst enemy of good government is not our ignorant foreign voter, but our educated domestic railroad president, our prominent business man, our leading lawyer.”
—John Jay Chapman (1862–1933)