My company designs and builds machines that use a grinding process to re-profile railroad rail heads. They travel down the track at slow speeds and several grinding stones set a different angles grind the rail heads to a desired profile. One of the byproducts of the grinding process is obviously swarf. We have no problems picking up the air borne particles but the heavier particles get deposited on the tracks. Our cusomers are requesting our machines to do a better job of cleaning up after themselves so we are looking into different ways of picking up those ferrous particles from the tracks. One idea was to use magnetism to pick up the particles but none of our engineering staff are experienced in magnetics so I am posting the issue here. Is it feasible to try to pick up grinding swarf off off a railroad track? To stay safe the magnets would need to be positioned approximately 12 inches away from the material we would like to collect. Is this possible? Can anyone point us to any companies that may be able to assit us?