Ethanol rail service questions

[STEVEN KEEN]

The White CO2 cars are for the EPCO plant right behind BSE. They also store the cars between the Highway 69 crossing and Bard Cement

[Mr. SP]

There is a ethanol plant operated by Cascade Grain at Clatskanie Oregon

The grain is corn in three bay hoppers in unit trains of 100+ cars. While I didn't count the cars of every train the shortest was 102 cars and the longest was 116 cars. The grain cars are like the Accurail 2000 series cars. The trains are all BNSF cars. Power is usually three big BNSF GE's but there has been SD60m's as well. There is no real pattern on the power, Sometimes all three units are in the lead and other times there is the third unit in DPU on the end,

The 30K gallon tankcars are available from Athearn, The ones here are UTLX or GATX cars. The ethanol is mostly shipped by barge to Portland to a tank farm on the waterfront.

There is also the mash cars which are four bay covered hoppers. These are similar to the corn hoppers but are four bay and longer. The mash is dried and sent out as cattle feed. The tankcars and mash cars are handled in the local freight.

[WSOR 3801]

 If modeling BSE, make sure you put it at the bottom of a fairly large hill.  The inbound train should be twice as long as the available track, necessitating all sorts of fancy moves to get 50 cars or more in a place where the longest track holds 27-30, with room for two engines at the end for headroom, and pulling a similar number of empties. 

The plant in Milton is better laid out, pretty flat, and not at the end of the line, yet similar in track plan to Monroe.  Bird's Eye View. 

The unloading shed is paved inside, as trucks unload there when they are not unloading railcars.  No engines inside the shed, they have a Shuttlewagon.

Tank car loadout is similar to the new Walthers kit.

Normal inbound grain hoppers are WSOR 16000 series cars, ex ATSF P-S low-side 4427s.  Walthers used to make a kit of these cars, not patched to WSOR though.  ExactRail is currently producing these cars in ATSF markings, only $40+ list price. Other WSOR grain cars can be seen from time to time, but the 16000 series cars are normal.  There are a few ex-ATSF hi-side 4427s used, but not many.  P2K made these cars.

The big 4-bay cars (Walthers announced) are seen hauling out DDG.  The Walthers tanks look about right for outbound moonshine.  Athearn cars could be used, as they are ~$10 cheaper, and fully assembled.  

 

 

[ericsp]

If you are looking for more cars to run to ethanol plants, here are a couple of ideas. I just bought The Model Railroader's Guide to Industries Along the Tracks 3. I have not yet read the section on ethanol, but one of the captions says that the Chippewa Valley Ethanol Company's Benson, MN plant is fueled by LPG. So, it probably would not be too far fetched to have LPG tankcars going to the plant. Also, there are ethanol plants fueled by coal. Here is one example.

[ericsp]

cv_acr

ericsp

I have seen gasoline shipped in the same size tankcars as ethanol and in LPG type tankcars. I have also seen a couple of smaller tankcars placarded for gasoline. I wonder how many ethanol plants actually receive gasoline by rail.

Gasoline and LPG are _not_ shipped in the same type of car. LPG is a compressed gas, while gasoline is naturally a liquid. Gasoline could be shipped in cars like Atlas's ACF and GATX 20-23K tanks.

 

Gasoline is shipped in 33,000 gallon, pressure tankcars.

http://www.railcarphotos.com/PhotoDetails.php?PhotoID=48308 

http://www.railcarphotos.com/PhotoDetails.php?PhotoID=48311 

http://www.railcarphotos.com/PhotoDetails.php?PhotoID=48309 

http://www.railcarphotos.com/PhotoDetails.php?PhotoID=16576 

http://www.railcarphotos.com/PhotoDetails.php?PhotoID=16577 

http://www.railcarphotos.com/PhotoDetails.php?PhotoID=48310 

http://www.railcarphotos.com/PhotoDetails.php?PhotoID=44085 

http://www.railcarphotos.com/PhotoDetails.php?PhotoID=44196 

http://www.railcarphotos.com/PhotoDetails.php?PhotoID=44195 

http://www.railcarphotos.com/PhotoDetails.php?PhotoID=44197 

http://www.rrpicturearchives.net/showPicture.aspx?id=1666226

http://www.rrpicturearchives.net/showPicture.aspx?id=1645024 

http://www.rrpicturearchives.net/showPicture.aspx?id=1549967 

http://www.rrpicturearchives.net/showPicture.aspx?id=1173876 

http://www.rrpicturearchives.net/showPicture.aspx?id=1549977 

[cv_acr]

ericsp

I have seen gasoline shipped in the same size tankcars as ethanol and in LPG type tankcars. I have also seen a couple of smaller tankcars placarded for gasoline. I wonder how many ethanol plants actually receive gasoline by rail.

Gasoline and LPG are _not_ shipped in the same type of car. LPG is a compressed gas, while gasoline is naturally a liquid. Gasoline could be shipped in cars like Atlas's ACF and GATX 20-23K tanks.

[BerkshireSteam]

Looking at pics on Badger State Ethanol photo section of the plant being built it looks like Walthers copied that particuar plant for their new ethanol series. I think I'm going to copy BSE as close as I can, I really liked the layout and look of the plant. It seems pretty evenly split between rail service and truck service, and is sized to make 40 million gallons a year. I figured it out to about 109,589 gallons a day and 3.6 tank cars a day, based on the Walthers 30 145 gal. cars. I did get some conflicting info though, from the site itself none the less. It heralded having contracts with 47 local grain elevators to support their corn needs, add a few pics of trucks delivering grain, yet the company profile says it gets a significant amount of grain from rail service. Which is ok, gives me plenty-o-time to plan and save $$$. The first in the series isn't available untill January, some of the latter stuff won't be around untill September. It all depends, but I might start building something else first, depending on how fast I find a new job. Got a couple of engines last week so now I'm getting real anxious to build something. I may just build something else, and then build the ethanol plant on a seperate level that I can add later, have it for of an operating diorama or something.

[jrbernier]

  There are several options here: 

• If you have rail delivered corn, them the 3 bay covered hoppers would be correct. 
• The DDG(Distillers Dried Grain) that is left over from the processing is shipped out in the longer 4 bay covered hoppers(less dense).
• The finished product is shipped out in this big 30,000 gal tank cars.  If this is a large plant(100-120 million gallon capacity), you may have inbound tank cars of gasoline.  The 99+++% ethanol cannot be shipped legally as it would be taxed as licquor - it is dilluted with gasoline(about 5%) before it leaves the production facility. 

  I toured a small 30 million gallon  facility a few years ago.  It produced something like 5-7 tank cars of ethanol per week, and about the same amount of those long 4 bay covered hoppers of DDG.  All of corn was delivered locally by truck(even the big 100+ million gallon plants are 'sized' to the local corn production economy).  Yeast and gasoline was trucked in.  Fuel was NG direct from a pipeline.

Jim

[justinjhnsn3]

Here is the website of the Badger state ethanol. It does not have that good of pics for the rail cars but it has alot of pics of the plant.

http://www.badgerstateethanol.com/index.asp

[RedGrey62]

I'm getting ready to do one in N scale for a project I'm helping with (all my stuff is HO).  After looking at a lot of pictures, I'm just going with Pikestuff buildings, 3, one for grain receiving, the grain processing and the ethanol processing areas.  Some of the finer details will have to be scratchbuilt/simulated.  The hardest part in N scale seems to be a good, modern tank loading platform, but I'll get thru that too.  Here is a nice plant across the river from me.  Check out their switcher in the photos section!

http://www.sireethanol.com/

Ricky Keil

[justinjhnsn3]

Badger State Ethanol in monroe WI recieves three types of cars i believe. 

[1] Grain cars. Now i grouped all the grain cars together because alot of the cars that Wisconsin southern brings in are a mix from various railroad that do not exist anymore. Like i have seen Santa Fe grain cars with their reporting marks changed but the rest of the car is unchanged.

[2] Tank cars to bring the ethanol out. Various types but most were around 60 ft ot 70 ft cars. all the cars that come are black.

[3] Tank cars that are designed to handle compress gases. I believe that they have compress CO2 in them. These case are white.

Wisconsin southern brings a train a couple of times a week to the plant.

[ericsp]

The 30,000 tankcars I have seen range in length from about 60' to about 70'. The Athearn and Walthers models are of the shorter cars.

I have seen gasoline shipped in the same size tankcars as ethanol and in LPG type tankcars. I have also seen a couple of smaller tankcars placarded for gasoline. I wonder how many ethanol plants actually receive gasoline by rail.

Trinity's website has information about its products. 

[BerkshireSteam]

Was looking around at Walthers not so soon to come ethanol plant structure series and MR's ehtanol plant done for the WSOR Troy Branch layout and it raised a few questions about the cars. I am using XtrkCAD for track planning and would like to have parameter files set up in the program so I can simulate the different types of cars seen for operating simulation and track planning.

How big are the 30 000 gallon tank cars?

What size tank car would typically be used for gas?

How big would those tank cars be?

How big are the Trinity 6351, 4750, 4650, 5161, 5701 covered grain hoppers?

I ask because I've gotten conflicting dimensions on some of the cars, like 54-56 feet for the 4750, I've also seen 47 feet and 50 feet listed for the 4650's, and 56-53 feet for the 5161's. I'm looking in particular for max width, car length, coupler-to-coupler length, and truck center.

One more thing to toss out there, is there any type of cars I'm missing? So far my main premise of ethanol plant information is from MR about there Badgerland Ethanol project for the WSOR Troy Branch, and Walthers descriptions for their new Cornerstone Series ethanol plant buildings. Some I will scratchbuild as the main structures all seem to be a bit pricey.