Mundane and worthless, but Im curious

[zendog64]

Mundane and worthless, but I'm curious

Sorry I don't have a picture to go along with this question, but I'm pretty sure somebody here knows the solution to this mystery.

Whenever I'm detecting along old railroad beds, usually in a location where coal and iron were mined, I'll inevitably dig up hundreds of tiny rocks that are perfectly spherical, often clustered together. They're smaller than marbles but larger than peas, and appear to be made of a dull gray rock.

What the heck are these I suspect these tiny stone balls were used by railroads for some purpose, but for the life of my I can't figure out what that purpose may be. Perhaps one of you railfans knows what these round stones were used for.

 

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[releventchair]

The other day I was shown some light kind of ore that had been tumbled before being loaded onto railroad box cars.
It has an iron like tarnish but is lightweight like aluminum. Un-uniform roundness and sizes. Pea sized to marble roughly also.
The owner of the samples picked a bucket of them up long ago and is painting them for slingshot ammo.
Said the rail cars spilled them when too full, so probably around a loading area ,or bumpy stretch of track.
I don't remember the ore type but it was northern Mi.. Not any of the copper,silver, or high density iron as mined up there.

 

[zendog64]

Sounds like the same thing I've been finding. These things certainly would make pretty good slingshot ammo, haha

 

[jewelerguy]

 

[submariner]

Sounds a lot like taconite(low grade iron ore) pellets.Used find a lot of them when I was a kid

 

[Kiros32]

Gotta be iron ore pellets. In the 60's they found a way to process iron ore fines from mine tailings, into pellets. The pellets were loaded (and still are) on rail cars and shipped to steel mills where they are used to make steel. I imagine many of these fell from the rail cars during transit.

 

[Kiros32]

Is this them?

 

[zendog64]

I finally got around to taking a picture. Mine are smaller but pretty much look exactly the same. I plan on digging up more and selling them as petrified Cocoa Puffs.

 

[Tigger]

yep, ore pellets/taconite - we were told at a mining place in the UP (in Michigan) that they could mix each batch to the specifications of the buyer, so each of y'all's collections could be made up of different mixtures. Isn't that cool? And I told my nephew (at first) that it was fossilized deer poop. for more info, this explains it pretty well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pelletizing

We did great with just a description -