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From a discussion about ore at Weirton Steel by David Shroads ...

Jumping in here (I worked on Weirton Steel's Railroad for several years in the early- to mid-1980s). Ore jennies were cars that looked sort of like beefy, short (24'), high-sided gondolas ( though some had troughs in the bottom more like a hopper but non-opening). They were specially fabricated for iron ore transport (IIRC 60 tons per car) and generally were delivered to Weirton in 'unit trains' of 120 cars or so. The cars were supposed to be in dedicated iron ore service and it was not unusual to see large blocks of numbers of the cars, in the same sequence, repeatedly over the course of an ore season. Conrail delivered the trains through our mill to a long group of tracks (that could accommodate multiple ore trains) in a holding area we called "East Weirton" and would also pick up the empties there. There, they were usually lined up ahead of the rotary ore dumper and shoved one car at a time onto the dumper. The rotary dumper had a length of track that was part of the tipping mechanism, clamps came down and car and the track it was on were tipped over to dump the ore out the top. After the ore was dumped, the ore bridge cranes moved it around as needed (the ore was sorted into piles by type). During the coldest winter months, the ore froze in the cars between the (Cleveland or Philadelphia) docks and our plant, so we put the cars through the "thaw shed" before dumping. The thaw shed exposed the underside of the cars to flames in an effort to thaw the ore in the bottom of the cars. When I worked there, a combination of coke oven gas, blast furnace gas, and natural gas fired the thaw shed. The cars were then taken to the ore dumper.

The pictures below are of a Conrail ore jenny and one taken in East Weirton showing the rotary ore dumper, an ore bridge (crane) waiting to move the ore to the correct pile, and part of an ore train and what appears to be a double PRR (pre-Conrail) unit and caboose either coming to pick up empties or having just dropped off an ore train. (Picture credit to unknown photographers)