The railway system was an important part of the iron and steel industry and of operating the Blocton coke ovens. The ovens were built with rails on top for the charging car, often called a larry, and with rails between each row of ovens for transporting the finished coke. In 1895, mining engineer John Fulton described a similar arrangement in which the larry track was made with T rails and placed midway between the ovens of a double row so a larry could discharge on each side. At the north end of the coke ovens, many of the huge end-buttress stones were removed in the 1980s to reconstruct an old iron furnace at Tannehill Ironworks Historical State Park, leaving exposed the brick pillars that had supported the weight of the railroad on top of the ovens. The smaller larry cars that ran on this track were used to dump coal into the holes on top of the ovens.