I remember when new water mains in Ottawa IL

Hello Lew, I enjoyed learning about pipe. When new water mains were put in along Porter Road and on the hill above Porter road the types of pipe in 1964 were large iron pipes with flanges and what looked like asphalt seals between the flanges. Would those have been shipped attached to a flange or inserted during assembly as the pipe was laid? Also I remember the high pressure gas lines being laid on the west side of Ottawa IL when they had to blast though many people's berms to lay the gas lines and run new high pressure black iron gas pipe into people's homes.  If I recall correctly these gas mains were smoothed ended and were welded together in the ditch. Some of these pipe were shipped in to Ottawa from a plant in Aurora IL. Since you seem to know both pipe and Northern Illinois do you know some of the names/locations of these water main and gas main manufacturers?

Thank you,

Ed

Pipe R not Pipe

Ed,

First I will note that I did not read the article, I am a large scale modeler and don't pay for the subscription. I am however a mechanical designer that spent about 13 years doing piping systems. The pipe on the flat car above are most likely rolled steel plate welded into pipe, most likely for gas pipelines somewhere. I see these all the time in my home town where Berg Pipe ships this type of load on The Bay Line (Gennessee and Wyoming) on a regular basis.

The pipe you speak of in your younger years is most likely a centrifugally cast iron pipe. This type of pipe was make in several types, flanged where the flanges were cast on the ends, and a system called 'bell and spigot' which might be misconstrued as flanged. Flanged pipe would be a machined surface where a gasket (usually rubber) would be sandwiched between the flanges to create the seal. In bell and spigot piping, one end of the pipe would have a pocket (bell) formed with an integral flange. This bell would be machined to provide good sealing surface for the gasket (usually looking like an O ring). The other end of the pipe would have a machined ball shaped outer side (spigot) that would slip into the bell end of the pipe. This would also have a two piece flange that would compress the gasket up against the inside of the bell and the surface of the spigot.

These two piping systems would commonly be used for water supply and storm/sewer drainage. The Flanged type of piping was fairly rigid in that it did not allow for mis-alignment during construction, and was limited to the fittings cast to work with the system. Bell and S-pgot was more forgiving in that the joints having the spherical spigot on one end would allow some degree of mis-alignment (I seem to remember 5 degrees off true) along with the standard fittings.

If you are interested in more information, contact me off list.