Hi Ron,
A decent reply to you regarding Snake Head rails would not be proper for this Ng site, but briefly I Just happened to try Goggle for Snake Head rail, and found this to be fitting to my feeling about the fable of Snake Heads. "OHIO...
"A related fable has to do with the dreaded "snakehead." The newspapers reported that "strap rail" came loose and penetrated the floors of passenger cars with great loss of life.
B. B. Adams, editor of The Railway Gazette, looked into this around the turn of the century, and could only find two cases. In one, a woman was slightly injured when a piece of iron entered a car in New York around 1848, and in the other, a workman was killed on a construction train of the Jersey Central some years earlier. Not that track did not sometimes disintegrate under a train and cause a derailment, but there were apparently no "snakeheads" at all resembling the lurid newspaper and magazine cartoons. Even the term "strap rail" is a newspaper attempt to represent the track as made from the thin iron used for packaging, when in fact the rail bars were substantial pieces of iron. Flat-bar track was given up because (1) it could not sustain heavy loads, (2) maintenance costs were very high, and (3) the wood deteriorated rapidly, and not because it was a safety hazard in itself. Jervis himself had given it up by the time he engineered the Hudson River Railroad in 1851."
Strap rail is a newspaper slang for what was actually flat-bar rail.
My research site was a line that obtained some very heavy marble and iron ore traffic so I wonder if any of these rails curled up before they all became so brittle they broke up. I am finding the latter and can not find any newspaper articles regarding the snake heads. We do know that car builder advertised adding metal plates on the underside of the floors of cars to prevent penentration, per John White of SI. Empire
