ALEXANDRIA, Va., June 17 -- United States Patent no. 12,312,645, issued on May 27, was assigned to JFE STEEL Corp. (Tokyo).
"Rail and manufacturing method therefor" was invented by Kenji Okushiro (Tokyo), Kazuya Tokunaga (Tokyo) and Moriyasu Yamaguchi (Tokyo).
According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A rail comprises a predetermined chemical composition. In a hardness distribution in a region from a rail head surface to a depth of 16.0 mm, a part having higher hardness than V1 that is minimum hardness in a first internal region is present in a second internal region, and hardness of the rail head surface is HBW 400 to 520 and average hardness in the region from the rail head surface to the depth of 16.0 ...