Larry,
I've not heard of SP&S handling solid sugar beet trains, or generating any sugar beet traffic. I'd sure like to hear more. From a map of sugar beet growing, it looks like there's a little bit around Pasco, so maybe some could come from there.
I went back through some articles on the SP&S cars. They were all built for use as woodchip cars. And were so assigned.
I suppose it's possible that some hauled sugar beets on occasion. If the cars are available, and there's a need, why not?
Oh, yes. Besides the SP&S woodchip car by Intermountain/Red Caboose, there's also the Intermountain Caswell cars. SP&S converted some of those, too.
Ed
Ed,As you know GN and SP&S ran solid sugar beet trains.There was a article in Trains magazine many years ago covering sugar beet trains that's why I thought that SP&S gon was a sugar beet car.
Larry
Conductor.
Summerset Ry.
"Stay Alert, Don't get hurt Safety First!"
BRAKIE 7j43k I "opted out" of reading this whole topic. Intermountain makes wood chip cars based on drop-bottom gondolas: Ed,I suspect those SP&S drop-bottom gondolas was used for sugar beets not wood chips.
7j43k I "opted out" of reading this whole topic. Intermountain makes wood chip cars based on drop-bottom gondolas:
Ed,I suspect those SP&S drop-bottom gondolas was used for sugar beets not wood chips.
Oh, no. The SP&S homebuilt their various conversions specifically for woodchip service. I believe they even bought some UP drop-bottoms and did the same.
Now, on the SP, there surely were sugar beet cars that looked pretty much the same. I once "rescued" a sugar beet from the truck sideframe of one of them.
7j43kI "opted out" of reading this whole topic. Intermountain makes wood chip cars based on drop-bottom gondolas:
Thank you for the replies and further photo support. Since I posted that request, I realized that I don't need the cars to unload at my chip pile. It could be used to LOAD the hoppers, gons, converted box cars, AND the ship at the dock. To this day a large chip facility in Coos Bay loads ships and rail cars. It is fed by chip trucks, and I could scratchbuild a few, enough to easily represent the trucks-in, rail and ships-out transfer.
Modern day method, I know, uses large cars built just for this purpose, but I'm modeling the early days of stopping the burning of waste material and chipping and using more. So converted cars will suffice.
I remember the trucks in my youth running highways 42 and 101 in Oregon with a slogan on the backs of the trailers; "We Haul Smoke" Dan
Not sure what lonewoof is describing. Could it be
Ballast Hopper
http://www.angelfire.com/il/cnw/open.html
Or
Coalporter
http://www.matts-place.com/trains/coal/images/tgnx30051.jpg
I tried to sell my two cents worth, but no one would give me a plug nickel for it.
I don't have a leg to stand on.
Southgate I'm reviving this old thread in the hopes that Lonewoof could possibly reload his blanked out picture, from a hosting service that currently works, please! I'm looking to build up a fleet of chip cars, not requiring a rotary dump. Dan
I'm reviving this old thread in the hopes that Lonewoof could possibly reload his blanked out picture, from a hosting service that currently works, please! I'm looking to build up a fleet of chip cars, not requiring a rotary dump. Dan
I "opted out" of reading this whole topic. Intermountain makes woodchip cars based on drop-bottom gondolas:
http://www.intermountain-railway.com/distrib/redcaboose/html/RR-35203.htm
They come in several roadnames. You could also build your own.
In particular, note that they do not require a rotary dump, since they have the doors.
lonewoof So what would you call one of these? It has slope sheets, and bottom doors (hinged across the width of the car), so is it a hopper?
So what would you call one of these? It has slope sheets, and bottom doors (hinged across the width of the car), so is it a hopper?
ConcoPhillips Santa Maria refinery's only finished products are petroleum coke and sulfur. The refinery process sour, heavy coke. The semi-refined product, after sulfur and coke extractions, are shipped via a 250-mile pipeline to the company's Rodeo refinery for further refining. Company policy prevented me taking photos within the refinery grounds at Santa Maria, but satellite shots should show the large piles of sulfur and coke within less than a mile south of the refinery. The sulfur is used as a fungicide on local vineyards, and the coke is shipped overseas to be used as fuel.
ConocoPhillips's Santa Maria, CA petroleum refinery ships raw petroleum coke via railroad hopper car. This fine-particulate product is loaded into railroad hoppers using a railroad-car-sized front loader. Custom-built metal covers for the hoppers are used to prevent the product from blowing away while in transit. The covers are removed for loading and unloading of the product. The coke is shipped to a southern California port where the hoppers are unloaded not through the hoppers, but by turning the cars upside down. Gee, hoppers cars treated as gondolas and "disguised" as covered hoppers while in transit.
Mark
The McNeil Station in Burlington, VT is a 50 Mega-watt bio-mass fueled electric planet belonging to Burlington Electric. It gets it's fuel via trailer trucks full of wood chips and via a 2-to-3-times a week 20-car wood chip unit train. All of the railcars belong to BE. The NECR delivers them to a strictly gravity dump at the plant. In the last few years it has been modified to also use Natural Gas, and they will soon be using both the Gas and Wood Chips together to make the plant more efficient, ie, produce more power with the same amount of fuel.
Bing has a nice aerial shot, complete with a wood-chip train going thru the unloader ! The Bird's Eye doesn't have a train.
McNeil Station in Burlington, VT
Gil
Where ever you go, there you are !
That's the best option I've yet seen!
As long as you want to unload one chip car at a time. I rather doubt a paper mill would use this method (unless it was a extremely small paper mill), it would take a huge amount of switching to spot each of the 30 or 40 cars of chips a day that a typical paper mill would use, one at a time. None of the papermills I have been associated with used this method, all were bottom dump mills.
Dave H. Painted side goes up. My website : wnbranch.com
cv_acr Third option when you have limited facilities: end ramp & front end loader:
Third option when you have limited facilities: end ramp & front end loader:
Anyone know if this was a one off operation or if anyone else used the same method?
Would I be right in thinking that the door is winched open using a winch supported on the fram in the foreground?
Any other "interesting" arangements?
Chris van der Heide
My Algoma Central Railway Modeling Blog
You could call it a boxcar (that's what they were made from).
You could call it a drop bottom gon.
You could call it a hopper.
The CofG classed it as a "woodchip" car type K140 (1971 ORER), which is an "equipped" hopper car type HTS with less than 154,000 lbs capacity.
It looks like they extended the sides of a 40 ft boxcar, welded a plate over the door, put in a slope sheet and added drop doors, with door mechanisms off WW1 era hopper cars . Its a prototype 100% kitbashed, homebuilt car.
Remember: In South Carolina, North is southeast of Due West... HIOAg /Bill
Look for the hinges on the car or a picture of the car.
Normally 3 general configurations on wood chip cars.
Hopper car. Regular hopper doors on the bottom of the car, hinged at the top and dump on or between the rails..
Gondola car. No doors. Turn it upside down to unload it.
Gondola car. End door, the car could be hinged on the top or hinged on the side. Lift the solid end of the car up in the air and dump the chips out the other end.
Hrmf. Well, since all this trying-to-understand-something looks like it's starting to irritate people, I will just go ahead and try to them out right mad The reviews for the models don't mention any details about doors on the woodchip cars, so lets just go ahead and ask, how are these doors hinged? Side hinged? Top hinged? Diagnoly hinged? Is it the whole end thats hinged? Just the wood chip extension? Just the drop-end of the gondola? Did I tick anyone of yet But in all serious I am asking to gain knowledge on the subject, not just to be annoying, although I may have tried that a little (pff, diagnolly hinged, I can see the posts now, "yea buddy well maybe your head is diagnolly hinged, so it swings right up your..."). Someone mentioned about top hinged but I wasn't quite sure what part of the car they were reffering too.
Once more with feeling. If its a gondola then you turn the car over in a rotary dumper or if it has an end door you can lift the car and dump it out that end.
I'm amazed at how difficult people are making this. If you have holes in the bottom of the car you can unload it through the holes. If there aren't holes in the bottom then you have to unload it through the top. I guess somebody could unload it with a clamshell or bucket unloader from the top, they do that with gravel on lower side gons and junk gons, but I've never seen it with wood chips.
So now that the drop bottom gondola debate portion is cleared, what about the OP? His subject little was "emptying woodchip gondolas" yet I don't recall that even mentioned in his actual post. I don't recall anyone answering that either. So how were the high-sided woodchip gondolas (the one's marketing by freight car makers, specially in N scale) unloaded? I don't know what I would use them for but I would like to have some. They would go right along with the drop-bottom gondola's, no real use for them lol.
PS. I also just thought of an interesting kitbash. One person mentioned he either thought or knew of some drop-bottom gondola's where the floor hinges ran across the width of the car, not the length. I forget who but someone makes a drop-bottom gon in N with the door lowering/raising mechanism on the outside. One could buy one of these and kitbash it so the door mechanisms ran across the the width of the car, on top of the gon, and use it as a ballast car. Maybe add some sort of detail to the bottom that looked like chutes or smaller doors so it seems the ballast is controled to flow between the rails and not just every where. Some thing to think about, and yes I know about the Difco side-dump ballast cars, but I think my idea would look just as cool.
cv_acr It's really not that complicated, if it has a solid bottom, it's a gondola. If it has bottom outlets, it's a hopper. So yes, the big car from Walthers with the bottom doors is a hopper; other types of woodchip cars are gondolas. The only "exception" is a drop-bottom gondola, which has a flat floor with doors that are hinged at the centre of the car and allow the car's contents to be unloaded to the sides. Example:
It's really not that complicated, if it has a solid bottom, it's a gondola. If it has bottom outlets, it's a hopper. So yes, the big car from Walthers with the bottom doors is a hopper; other types of woodchip cars are gondolas.
The only "exception" is a drop-bottom gondola, which has a flat floor with doors that are hinged at the centre of the car and allow the car's contents to be unloaded to the sides.
Example:
That's an interesting pic . Shows that there are still drop bottom gons. Even more interesting this one discharges to the sides as mentioned. At least some of the earlier ones I went on about earlier dropped their load straight down... the hinges were across the car IIRC. More significantly only a few of them achieved such a large area of the floor opening...most of them had a limited or no door space over the trucks... meaning that while most of the load could be dropped straight out they always needed some assistance from shovel pushers to get the whole load out.
I think that I've not got across the point that CSX are actually calling the same car by two names in their public literature.
I certainly agree that allsorts of people get into such issues and confuse the matter... but what I suspect has happened in this case is that the original whopping great big cars were hoppers and were commonly known as hoppers. Then when the later, different, cars came along looking much the same and carrying the same load I suspect that people just kept calling them "woodchip hoppers" regardless of the fact that they were gons. This probably happened with RR men, customers and hobbyists. The people who may have got caught out would have been those taking orders for cars... hence the need to publish and note the difference between the two types and stress that the "rotary woodchip gondolas" could only be unloaded by rotary equipment.
I would suggest that when a crew looked along a consist they would probably just see the huge cars and, not being able to see under them end on from a distance, think of them and talk of them as woodchip hoppers. In a lot of cases this wouldn't matter.
The issue ties in with the "open this side only" thread. Local yard masters and conductors would be aware of facilities on their patch that had a specific need and keep an eye open for trouble. This would only need to be a glancing check. Regular cars would get no reaction, cars with new or different paint would warrant a second look just to be sure.
Then again... the people sending the woodchips wouldn't want problems to arise at the far end so they would be keeping an eye out that loads going to places without a rotary dump (and loads going to end dumps) didn't get into the wrong sort of cars.
Thank for your responses everybody
Dave-the-Trainwoodchip cars (such as those made by Walthers and LBF?EC Shops) come with bottom doors - okay, so those are hoppers - OR they come with no bottom doors with either no doors at all, presumiably rotary, or end doors for end dumping. The thing is... they all seem to be called "Woodchip Hoppers" and not "Woodchip Gons". I've noticed this particularly because I want to get more of the type with proper hopper doors in the floor and they are really awkward to identify on EBay. Plus almost all of the models are of the other types. So, anyway, does this mean that woodchip "cars" are the exception that proves the rule?
The thing is... they all seem to be called "Woodchip Hoppers" and not "Woodchip Gons". I've noticed this particularly because I want to get more of the type with proper hopper doors in the floor and they are really awkward to identify on EBay. Plus almost all of the models are of the other types.
So, anyway, does this mean that woodchip "cars" are the exception that proves the rule?
No it just proves that people have no idea how to identify what they're talking about.
I think what we have here is a failure to communicate and understand railroad speak.
Look again at the BOTTOM DUMP woodchip hopper..Unlike the rotatory dumped hopper the bottom dump can be unloaded the bays along the bottom of the car whereas the rotary woodchip hopper can not be bottom unloaded.Therefore in railroad speak the rotary woodchip hopper is a gon since it can not be unloaded from the bottom.
Both terms can be use freely.
There was some pass railroad speak that was confusing to most modelers because they failed to pass railroad speak 101.So,modelers came up with their own speak which differs from railroad speak and then the "experts" muggled this speak until the 2 speaks is unrecognizable and confusing to most..
Dave-the-TrainMeanwhile, back at my OP.... do woodchip cars have rotary couplers?
You would have to check each individual series of car on each individual railroad or owner. Cars intended to be rotary dumped don't necessarily need rotary couplers. Only cars intended to be unloaded coupled in train need rotary couplers. Cars intended to be unloaded in a single car dumper, uncoupled from the other cars don't need rotary couplers.
Wood chips
Hmmm! Seems to me that they don't know what it is!
Either that or...
The inherited generic/popular/common term used for dirty great big carscarrying woodchips has come down as "woodchip hopper" and that's what everyone is stuck with... but some of those "hoppers" are not hoppers... so CSX is stressing the point
" The rotary car can only be unloaded by using a rotary car dumper".
So... what this sort of proves... is the same thing that we managed toagree on in the tank car thread... what things get called is not consistant.
Umm? should I say that it is consistant? because people keep calling woodchip cars "hoppers" even when they're not hoppers but gons? ... except the CSX marketing people are... calling themboth... within a few words of each other,
Why don't they have a smiley for someone exploding?
Meanwhile, back at my OP.... do woodchip cars have rotary couplers?
Thanks
tomikawaTT So what, exactly, is a drop-bottom gondola? Chuck (Modeling Central Japan in September, 1964 - with drop-SIDE gondolas)
So what, exactly, is a drop-bottom gondola?
Chuck (Modeling Central Japan in September, 1964 - with drop-SIDE gondolas)
A Drop bottom Gon is a Gon with doors in the floor that can be released to drop down... which should result in the load (or most of the load) dropping out. AFAIK they were mostly used for coal traffic and mostly for domestic coal being delivered to local traders and/or team tracks... but I'm sure that I could be proved wrong on this.
The evidence that I do have for cars c1880 - c1910 is that a whole variety of cars were produced for mutiple use. The aim was to minimise non-paying/empty backhaul. The result was a number of "combination car" designs. (This was not the meaning of "combination car" later used when cars were made of a mix of steel frame with wood cladding - particularly during WW2 whenthere was a steel shortage).
Designs fo combination cars that I have copies of drawings for include
The thing with all these cars was that the abilty to remodel the car meant extra structure and extra weight. Their initial cost would have been much higher and they probably suffered from high maintenance /lost or stolen parts and ill fitting panels. In short the concept of reconfiguring a car to be able to carry a load at all times was desireable but the practice proved to be too complicated and more expensive than effective. It also has to be remembered that labour to shovel loads in or out of cars remained relatively cheap. The rise in labour costs happened to pretty much coincide with the spread of steel bodied cars. These cars tended to be bigger almost from their start. The weight of moveable panels in a steel car would have been a problem.
The surviving drop bottom gons are about the only design that required comparatively little in the way of extra parts and extra weight. I would not have wanted the job of climbing into one to shovel coal (or whatever) fromthe non-self-clearing areas!
I have extremely little evidence of any sort of US gons with drop sides. The only ones I can recall for sure were effectively a gon version of a side discharge hopper. That is, they were gons with small doors in the lower part of the sides. Think an ordinary gon with lots of little doors added between each vertical side frame member. The top rail of the side remained solid/continuous. These doors seem to have been more usually top hung rather than drop down.
Except for a few MoW cars I don't recall ever seeing an example of a US gon with a complete drop side or full height drop doors in the side. I could be wrong... but I haven't seen any.
I suspect that this design difference from "everybody else" is due to the centre beam frame design and draft gear of US designed cars. These come from the covered wagon and are entirely logical in the US context. "Everybody else" followed the equally logical design of horse carriages and farm carts both of which built their bodies on side frames. "Everybody else" also used drop doors of full height and "cupboard" doors while the US normally use sliding doors except on reefers.
So, modelling Japanese railways, Chuck falls into the world of "everbody else" and gets drop sides and probably a bunch of design features that look odd in the US. I don't recall whether (at least older) Japanese stockhad side buffers and hook & chain coupling rather than combined (buckeye) centre buffer-couplers?
That was a bit of a digression but it was my OP!
markpierce Brakie, thanks for helping to prove my point. As far as self-clearing, I'll agree human invervention is needed to open hopper doors. Mark
Brakie, thanks for helping to prove my point.
As far as self-clearing, I'll agree human invervention is needed to open hopper doors.
I figured if I looked long enough I would find the facts according to the prototype.
So,it depends on the type of woodchip car and I knew the picture your friend sent didn't fit in the grand scheme of things except as a open hopper suited for coal,coke,stone,ores,gravel etc....So,there had to be a correct answer in railroad speak.
And we now have the answer in railroad speak.