Rail splitting hammer - GIF

[mwmkravchenko]

I wonder if American rails are that brittle... what's shown here appears to me to behave more like cast iron than the forged 1084 steel that U.S. rails are made from.

You really think that rails in China would be any less robust? Doesn't make any sense to go through all the effort to install a rail bed and then install inferior rails. The Chinese are indeed very practical. Stuff like that would not fly very far.