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Coal hauling on a transitional western layout
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[quote user="Dave-the-Train"] <P>WOW! Great stuff! [:D]</P> <P>Just one problem... </P> <P>I held off getting (coal) hoppers for my 80s just-west-of-Chicago model for ages figuring that boxcars, covered hoppers and tankcars would dominate... but then I stumbled on a pile of Bowser ATSF hoppers with unique numbers and a fairly late build date. I'm a sucker of strings of the same or very similar cars... so... how do I explain non-unit trains of hoppers?</P> <P>Presumiably strings of the big coal gons coming out of the Powder River will be okay? (I hope)!</P> <P>If they don't carry coal would they load or bakload aggregate for highway construction?</P> <P>TIA [8D]</P> <P>[/quote]</P> <P>Late 1980s -- there would be lots of utility coal moving in mostly steel cars, both rotary-dump gons and standard cross hoppers. You'd see a lot of private-owner cars, but as a rule, foreign-road cars are going to be scarce. That is, on BN you would see BN cars but not UP cars; on UP you would see UP cars but not BN cars, and so forth.</P> <P>You can use a standard cross hopper for aggregate if you don't load it more than about 1/2 full. Gravel rarely moves very far by rail; there are a lot of 50-mile aggregate moves but almost none that travel further. Because you would have to clean the hopper both ways for a coal headhaul with an aggregate backhaul (power plants don't like stones in their coal-handling machinery and concrete doesn't like coal dust as an admixture), backhaul moves in a coal headhaul are quite rare except for commodities that move a long distance such as taconite pellets.</P> <P>S. Hadid</P>
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