An unusual "rock"

[USER=150]@Stacy Carroll[/USER]
Looks like a piece of coral to me. 🙂

Once you associate it to RR ballast, it has great potential to be a OOP rock.

OOP rocks are Out Of Place rocks.
Could have been stuck in the RR car, for 5 yrs, and finally fell off, and any association to the geography, where you found it, is purely via the RR.
I'm of the opinion that it's a rock looking thing...mmmm hmmmm.

Stacy Carroll, post: 420066, member: 150 wrote: I'm no Geologist, but this looks a lot like lava. Now how it ended up in Po-Dunk Rural Georgia, I don't know for sure. Any ideas?

can't tell you what it is but have seen very similar in the RR ballast around here, much smaller though

paden cash, post: 420123, member: 20 wrote: I hope not. Bringing something "exotic" home can get a man in a lot of serious trouble...

You are sooo right! I tried that once. It was a bad idea...

Steam locomotives had their fire/ash pans dumped at a regular interval. It could be clinker from such a dump.

More likely it is iron furnace or steel mill slag, which was quite often used for ballast is it was cheap, as in you can have it if you haul it away. It made even more sense because railroads hauled hopper cars of coal, coke, iron ore and limestone to steel mills and the hopper cars would return as an empty load.

Slag was also used in the production of cinder block, lighter weight than the typical cement block of today. Hot molten slag would sometimes have air introduced before it was dumped on slag piles to cool, making it a lighter weight.

I worked at the Bethlehem Plant of Bethlehem Steel where slag aggregate was sent to the local concrete mixing plant and be returned as redi-mixed concrete for almost all our construction projects.

Paul in PA

I think Paul has your answer.

Mark Mayer, post: 420068, member: 424 wrote: It looks more like a frothy limestone to me. Lava is generally darker in color (basalt). Although it can be light colored (rhyolite).

That's what I was going to say....Limestone. I had some rocks like this in my yard in Kansas for decoration.