North America has only one large producer of rail, Orion Steel’s Rocky Mountain Steel Mills and it just raised prices about 60%... and the two customers, BNSF Railway and Union Pacific, are "crying poor", saying they can't afford the rail at market price. So, the producer stopped delivering.

The railroads say Rocky Mountain’s halt in rail shipments threatens safety and service because no other domestic rail manufacturer can supply enough rail — and mills in Japan and China require long lead times and their rails are subject to U.S. tariffs and anti-dumping policies.

Rocky Mountain Steel says a long-overdue adjustment to market pricing will keep its Pueblo, Colo., facility churning out rail.

“As the largest supplier of steel rail in the U.S., Rocky Mountain Steel is an essential part of the domestic steel industry. We’ve already seen the closure of Steelton in Pennsylvania this year, the only other fully dedicated rail mill in the country, and the loss of hundreds of United Steelworker jobs there,” a Rocky Mountain spokesman said. 

Cleveland Cliffs idled its Steelton, Pa., in June 2025 and later said it would permanently close the facility in January.

“We requested a reasonable, years-overdue price adjustment to avoid the same result in Colorado. We hope the railroads will choose to reject cheap imported steel and ensure the viability of domestic steel production by paying market prices.”

The only other major U.S. rail manufacturer — the Steel Dynamics mill in Columbia City, Ind. — lacks the production capacity to replace the output of Rocky Mountain Steel, the railroads say.

The Pueblo mill was founded in 1881 as Colorado Fuel and Iron Co. UP has been a longtime customer — and purchased CF&I’s first rail. Evraz acquired the mill in 2007.

In 2015, UP began importing most of its rail from Nippon Steel & Sumitomo Metal Corp., which could make 480-foot-long sections of rail. The Evraz facility’s rails maxed out at 80 feet at that time.

“But this wasn’t as simple as Nippon making something Evraz Pueblo didn’t,” according to the Alliance for American Manufacturing. “The Colorado facility had long been battered by unfairly traded steel imports, which severely undercut American workers and companies. That meant Evraz couldn’t make the plant upgrades it needed to compete.”

In 2018, the U.S. imposed a 25% tariff on foreign-made steel, which prompted UP to once again source most of its rail purchases from Evraz. And that allowed Evraz to invest in the new solar-powered production facility that can make 320-foot rails.

https://www.trains.com/pro/freight/class-i/colorado-steel-mill-halts-rail-shipments-to-bnsf-and-up/