ADVANCED MATERIALS & PROCESSES | MAY/JUNE 2025 19 The specimen studied in this work is a narrow-gauge rail of the Decauville type donated by the Raúl Scalabrini Ortiz Railway Museum, in the city of Haedo, a province of Buenos Aires. This type of rail was used in Argentina from 1884 as secondary tracks that were assembled and disassembled to transport loads. Specifically, this Decauville rail profile at the Haedo station of the Buenos Aires Western Railway was used as an auxiliary track for transport to and from the railway’s workshop. Decauville was a French factory that built locomotives, wagons, and rails created by the engineer Paul Decauville (1846-1922), a pioneer of industrial railways[1]. The company, founded in 1875 in the French commune of Corbeil-Essonnes (very close to Paris), had its origins in the application of metal detachable tracks for agricultural tasks. Today, it is dedicated to the manufacture of bodies and special equipment for heavy vehicles. Decauville’s main innovation was the use of ready-to-use prefabricated narrow-gauge sections, composed of rails fixed on steel sleepers[2]. His first railway had a track gauge of 400 mm, later refined and widened to 500 and 600 mm. METALLOGRAPHIC CHARACTERIZATION OF A DECAUVILLE NARROW-GAUGE RAIL A study of a narrow-gauge rail used in agriculture in Argentina shows its chemical composition and suggests how it was processed. Patricia Silvana Carrizo,* Head of the Archaeometallurgy Area, Institute of Materials and Applied Technology (IMTECAP), National Technological University Mendoza Regional Faculty, Argentina *Member of ASM International Fig. 1 — Metal vehicle designed by Paul Decauville for harvesting sugar beets with a capacity of 250 kilos. Circa 1880. Fig. 2 — Drawing showing the size, weight, and flexibility of the portable track. His engineering training led him to create portable narrow-gauge rails (40 and/ or 50 cm wide) where the rail and the sleeper are a single piece, like a ladder. With them he built a steel road, which was easily dismantled because it was light and easy to assemble (Fig. 1). To create the rolling stock, Decauville used the principle of load division, distributing the weight on numerous flat vehicles and placing trapezoidal metal baskets on top of them (Fig. 2). This innovation created the portable railway, a means of transport that allowed him to carry out his agricultural activity more efficiently. By mechanizing, he managed to obtain 9000 tons of beets for one harvest[3]. The railway was made of several platforms that, when loaded with beets, ran on the track in short paths of approximately 100 m[4]. Thus, the field workers collected the product supported by baskets and once filled, placed them on the carts and pushed them toward the collection point. On August 30, 1857, the Buenos Aires Western Railway, then called “Society of the Railway from Buenos
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