Railroad spikes are fairly low-carbon, and usually unclear what carbon content they are. That makes them fairly soft, which means they won't hold an edge. For anything serious you probably want at least a 1070 carbon steel (that's 0.7% carbon), and probably even harder for the edge itself.

There's definitely a "lean" in my blade between the blade and the tang; it twisted slightly during quenching and I didn't catch it in time. Getting something perfectly aligned is a lot harder than it looks. :-) (And from my experience, if you only paid $50 for a custom hatchet then, well, you got what you paid for. I know I couldn't make something worth using for $50 worth of my time at my skill level.)

Still, I'm going to keep working on it. Hopefully blade 2 will work out better. From the sound of it plenty of people here are interested in it so I'll post pictures when it's done.