Rotary Dumpers, when were they invented?

[train18393]

The C&O had one at their Lake Front Docks (or was that Presque Isle that was C&O) near Toledo Ohio. It was installed in the very early 50s I believe. My dad worked for the C&O there as a freight conductor. They either refered to it as the "new" machine or the German Machine, as he said it was made in Germany. It would dump two hoppers at the same time, and was much quicker that the older machines which picked one car up, turned it upside down and dumped it through a chute into the boat. That new machine dumped onto conveyor belts and was several hundred feet from the slip. They ran conventional hoppers into it as well as conventional hoppers with rotary couplers. He said the end that was painted in colour was the end the rotary coupler was on. Many of the conventional hoppers had rotary couplers put on them if my memory serves me correctly. They would run them as "unit" trains up from Kentucky and Virginia for off loading onto the Lake boats. Don't laugh at the term boats. That is what they were called even if some of them were over 600' long.

 

Paul

Dayton and Mad River RR

[twcenterprises]

A working dumper might be too much for me. Rotary couplers are available. But I want to stick with standard kadees.  I won't be really moving coal or dumping it or filling the cars.
I will use a put/take style of operating, a little trick  where matching industries are scenickly placed in different locations but you push say empty cars into the coal mine, they will show up back at the power plant empty thru a hidden tunnel between industry locales, on double track, then you have permanently loaded cars you shove into the power plant and they show up at the mine.
I could have a static one but its not my priority.

This is also referred to as a "loads in, empties out/empties in, loads out" arrangement.  That is to say, empties in, loads out at the mine, and loads in, empties out at the coal dock/steel mill/whatever.  Don't ask me where I read this because I can't remember, but it's a fairly well known reference (as far as I know).

Brad

[whitman500]

Indeed, if you look at the image from Walthers, you'll find the dumper has a MILW chip gon embraced by the dumper. We probably should keep in mind this image. Modern rotary dumpers for coal gons would be a bit smaller (diameter & entry height), commensurate with the smaller gons used for the much denser coal load. Still, the mechanical principal remains the same.

Just to close the loop on this point, I bought the Walthers kit and it includes some options to make it a coal or a wood chip dumper.  For example, you can shorten the kit and lower the height of the clamps so that it will fit a coal hopper.

[dinwitty]

A working dumper might be too much for me. Rotary couplers are available. But I want to stick with standard kadees.  I won't be really moving coal or dumping it or filling the cars.
I will use a put/take style of operating, a little trick  where matching industries are scenickly placed in different locations but you push say empty cars into the coal mine, they will show up back at the power plant empty thru a hidden tunnel between industry locales, on double track, then you have permanently loaded cars you shove into the power plant and they show up at the mine.
I could have a static one but its not my priority.

[whitman500]

Thanks Beaver 14 that's brilliant!

Totally agree.  A great answer to the question.

[Dave-the-Train]

Thanks Beaver 14 that's brilliant!

[Beaver14]

As a native of the Beaver State (Oregon!) and a long-time fan/student of my native state's RR and industry, I've been bemused by the discussion on this thread--most of which is spot on--but for other areas of the country. Schooling and Army service took me to other parts of the country, including observing the C&O coal dumper on the dock at Newport News, VA.

The Walthers rotary dumper that prompted this thread was origninally developed and marketed as part of their lumber and paper products industry series. Indeed, if you look at the image from Walthers, you'll find the dumper has a MILW chip gon embraced by the dumper. We probably should keep in mind this image. Modern rotary dumpers for coal gons would be a bit smaller (diameter & entry height), commensurate with the smaller gons used for the much denser coal load. Still, the mechanical principal remains the same.

As to wood chips Tony Thompson's pair of SP Freight Car volumes on gondolas (Vol. 1) and box cars (Vol. 4) document SP's adaptations and eventually purpose built cars for chip service--think Oregon! The early cars, as noted previously in this thread, were box cars with roofs removed, main doors fixed, and new side dump doors cut into the lower wood side panels. At that time (say up until the early 50's) they were known as "hog fuel" cars, mostly hauling sawdust which served as a common fuel for home heating and industry in the Northwest in the 20's and 30's.

The development of paper processes like the Kraft process (think brown paper bags and cardboard as the ultimate product) created a new market for wood chips. With that market came a transportation need/market that led to racks on GS gondolas. Thoroughout the 50's the chip traffic in Oregon was served by the bottom dump (GS) gons and the side-dump box car conversions.

By the 1960's, the traffic had grown to the point where purpose-designed and built cars were appropriate. This led to the big chip gons, first with plywood sides, later all steel. Fairly early in the 60's the rotary dumpers came in, allowing these purpose-built gons to dispense with their bottom dumps. Others should note the big chip gons developed by the Southern Rwy for their chip service in the South. I recall these retained bottom dump mechanisms.

A split in material handling occured in the early 60's. Mills north of the Columbia settled on end dump technology. South of the Columbia (Oregon) settled on rotary dumpers. Consequently, SP's big steel chip gons were designed for rotary dumping. You'll see this on the "smooth side" gons from E&C/LBF with the dumper reinforcing plates on the sides (2 or 4 per side). Roads serving industry north of the Columbia (GN, NP, SP&S, MILW and even UP) used end dump doors. Indeed, SP&S records indicate the specific receiving mill their chip rack gons were converted for and assigned to.

Dumping in all cases was by individual car --no need for rotary couplers. A previous post noted the slower pace required to feed a typical paper mill. Even the huge Western Kraft mill at Albany/Millersburg, OR, had no need to go beyond individual car dumping. This is quite a contrast to those coal dumpers fed by multiple 160 car hopper trains daily.

So, with respect to the specific Walthers rotary dumper model, let's peg it as a creation of the 1960's paper (wood chips) industry. Well noted by other posters are the other uses of rotary dumping from much earlier for other commodities.

[Dave-the-Train]

As well as several other types LBF make a rotary dump woodchip gon...

http://www.lbfcompany.com/images/1032.jpg

Also, having a lazy day just hunting around odd RR stuff I discovered a reference to woodchip hoppers being used in beet taffic for sugar plants...

http://www.michiganrailroads.com/MichRRs/News/2001Briefs/November2001.htm

It's about halfway down the page... would make an unusual update if it'e your modelled area...

[NeO6874]

This site has a pic of one around 1920

http://www.ohiohistory.org/etcetera/exhibits/ohiopix/image.cfm?ID=5424

 

Thats earlier then I would have guessed, though this looks to be a slightly different design.

I can just see the "new guy" the first time he sees that tipper in action -

"Boss! That thing over there just ate a gon!"

[marknewton]

Railphotog wrote:

< Why not do a Google search? Or on Wikipedia? >

Wikipedia? Maybe he wants an answer that is credible and /or useful?

As for the timeframe for rotary dumpers, the Virginian Railway "battleship" gondolas date from the mid-1920s, and were designed to be unloaded in a rotary dumper, so they were presumably in service then.

Cheers,

Mark.

[Virginian]

I have never seen a rotary coupler on a chip car.  A rotary dumper for dumping cars that remain coupled utilizing rotary couplers is MUCH larger, and therefore I am sure more expensive.  Also, with a separate one car at a time system the load is pretty much centered, loaded and empty, so it only takes a relatively small motor to operate the rotary function.  A 2000 ton a day pulp mill is a big one, so one would not need to dump that many cars a day, even if 100% of their supply was by rail.

The old N&W coal dock was a cool operation.  One car would be uncoupled from the string, and then roll down by gravity, and then be lifted/rolled up on an elevated track like a roller coaster works.  From any distance the whole thing looked like a huge black roller coaster.  At the top the car would then roll downhill on a gradual grade out onto the coal pier and be switched to whichever rotary dumper was scheduled, dump, and then be released to roll back downhill in the direction it came from off the dock, and back into the yard where it would couple onto a train of empties being made up for another run to the mountains.  Those car braking systems coming off that pier had to take a heck of a beating.

[Dave-the-Train]

Rotary dumping those chip cars must have taken a huge dumper (size wise) but I guess that the load was lighter.  Were the car ends marked for the rotary coupler?

Am I right in thinking that LBF made some of the end tippers?  I've managed to find a couple of Walthers hopper type cars for a small works in town (since I learnt that they did happen)... going to cut the corner off a building to get the clearance for the long cars' middle-of-side.

Does anyone have dates for carved up boxcars and/or the switch to purpose built cars please?  Come to that... were they RR or private cars and did they get a full repaint?

(Er... hope no-one minds me going a bit off-topic )

Pics on all of these please anyone???

TIA

Then again... weren't some of the woodchip cars emptied by vacuum pipes???

(Typical car buying scenario... for months I kept finding nothing but titanium Dioxide tank cars and thinking "What on earth was that for"?  Then I learnt a bit about paper making and... do you think I can find one or a china clay tank car anywhere???   Never mind... it will give my piggy bank time to recover from a couple of great RS27s ).

Oh yes.. and a lot if not all of the covered hoppers are stencilled with instrucions to open hatches before unloading so while not "sealed" the hatches must be capable of forming a seal with the body in normal use.  I've seen pics of tank cars that have collapsed inwards when not vented while unloading but not covered hoppers... anyone seen this???

[mlehman]

Virginian,
Yes, good point, wood chips are a factor also. Many of the early woodchip cars were converted boxcars. Cut the roof off, maybe add some extensions to get more chips in the car, weld the side doors shut, then run it through a rotary dumper to empty it. Same era issues for use of rotary couplers apply.

The end dump cars for chips that were mentioned further up were much less common. They're a lot more trouble to switch, so the gains in productivity are less. I suspect that an end dump application was probably less expensive to install, so a smaller customer or one in a tight urban area, which are few and far between I'd bet, might have one of these, instead of a rotary dump. No need for a rotary coupler on an end dump, of course.

[Virginian]

I saw the individual car dumpers in the 1950's, on the N&W at Lambert's Point (which is in Norfolk, VA)  and on the Virginian at Sewell's Point also in Norfolk.  I used to watch Lambert's Point from my bedroom thru a telescope.  The C&O, right across Hampton Roads, may have had them too, but I didn't see theirs in service.

Chip car rotary dumpers, that worked with regular dumper bottom cars, were definitely in service thru the 1970's, because I worked in a mill with one.

[Dave-the-Train]

Immediate thought before opening the thread was that I've seen a book which suggested that Roman miners used trams on wood rails that were tipped by semi rotary tippers... but these were end-on tippers.

While reading the erudite suggestions that one should turn to Wikepedia or Google (I've been given that really useful advice a couple of times) it occured to me that the book suggested something similar having been developed in Northern Germany in the Middle Ages.

So you don't need to worry about being too early!

I like the additional stuff about grain cars.  Just to top up on this... use of covered hoppers accelerated when they sorted out the top hatch seals to keep the load dry.  (PS I'm not saying that they are "sealed" just that they can keep enough water out).

Am I correct in thinking that some woodchip cars were built to end dump?

PS  Early dumps tended to lift and dump the cars individuallybut (if it's the Walthers model I think it is) later dumps seem to keep the cars at track level and rotate them along the axis of the draft gear.  The question would seem to be why this wasn't adopted earlier?  I'm pretty certain that I've seen the more modern type of dumpers built to rotate two cars at once.

I imagine that pretty much everyone is aware that cars with rotary couplers usually have the rotary coupler end of the car distinctly marked - usually with a block of colour all round the car end.  This gives the dump operator a clear indicator that cars are marshalled the right way round and don't need to be uncoupled before dumping.  getting the couplers wrong would be a bit disastrous!

[mlehman]

Here's another bit of information. The 1960s are a rough dividing line. Before that time, rotary car dumpers tended to be located only at very large facilities, like ocean shipping terminals for coal. The cars used tended to be bottom dump capable. The rotary dumping methods simply speeded up  unloading. The cars used conventional couplers and were dumped individually wihile broken apart from the train.

The mention of car dumpers in grain service is more likely referring to a car tipper. These were used in the days before the grain trade went almost exclusively to covered hoppers. Boxcars would have grain doors inserted to span the door opening. At the receiving elevator, a variety of methods were used to help speed unloading through the side door once the grain door was broken open. The most efficient of these was the car tipper, which clamped the boxcar, tipped it to one side then fore and aft, in order to literally pour the last of the grain out of the car. Typically, these would only be seen at larger elevators. Smaller elevators used cable plows and good 'ol shovels to get the last of the grain out. Covered hoppers put an end to these less efficient practices and to grain being hauled in boxcars, except on trackage too light or undermaintained to handle loaded grain hoppers.

In the 1960s, several things changed for rotary dumping technology. The installations spread much mare widely and became far more compact. The typical power plant, instead of using bottom unloading cars over pits spanned by tracks began using rotary dumpers. The cars increasingly tended to be gons, with no provision for bottom dumping. Although you can still see many conventional hoppers in service, they are a much smaller percentage of the fleet hauling coal, etc than they used to be. And these new coal cars/gons tend to have rotary couplers, so that there is no need to uncouple individual cars as they go through the dumper, further expediting unloading.

So the key thing to search for more history of this transition may be the term "rotary coupler" in order to find more info on when and how it came into service.

[pcarrell]

This site has a pic of one around 1920

http://www.ohiohistory.org/etcetera/exhibits/ohiopix/image.cfm?ID=5424

 

Thats earlier then I would have guessed, though this looks to be a slightly different design.

[whitman500]

I've got photos of 40' single sheathed boxcars in rotary dumpers at LARGE flour mills from the late 1930s. It's not quite what you had in mind, but it's pretty close.

And from the 1940s, there are photos of rotary dumpers in coal service, at large rail to barge transshipment points on the great lakes. Those photos are buried somewhere in the huge Library of Congress photo site (and they're in color!). Those might be more of what you're looking for.

Thanks.  This is a helpful data point.  In searching around some of the old posts on this subject, I saw that someone was trying to model a rotary dumper at Lambert's Point in Baltimore in 1950 which is consistent with your data.  There seems to be enough plausible information for me to go buy the kit.

[orsonroy]

I've got photos of 40' single sheathed boxcars in rotary dumpers at LARGE flour mills from the late 1930s. It's not quite what you had in mind, but it's pretty close.

And from the 1940s, there are photos of rotary dumpers in coal service, at large rail to barge transshipment points on the great lakes. Those photos are buried somewhere in the huge Library of Congress photo site (and they're in color!). Those might be more of what you're looking for.

[GearDrivenSteam]

Why not do a Google search?  Or on Wikipedia?  You can do it yourself.

I already have.  Google brings up nothing that is helpful.  The entry in Wikipedia is a stub that says nothing about when they were introduced.  Maybe next time you can give people the benefit of the doubt instead of assuming they're lazy or stupid.  In return I'll try not to assume you're a jerk.

No need for assumption, whitman. He's a jerk. A very knowledgable jerk, and a VERY good modeling jerk, but a jerk.

[csmith9474]

I, for one, appreciate these kinds of questions.  It's an interesting topic that I probably wouldn't have taken the time to research myself.  However, since it's now drawn some attention, it's fun to see what kinds of historical facts and photos come up.

I'm modelling coal operations in the 1960's, but I'm using bottom-drop hoppers.

If Walthers is making a working rotary dumper, does that mean someone is also making rotary-joint couplers for those cars?

Sergent produces the rotary couplers in HO.

Edit: I guess a link would help...

http://www.sergentengineering.com/

..or maybe I could tell you to go find it yourself.

[MisterBeasley]

I, for one, appreciate these kinds of questions.  It's an interesting topic that I probably wouldn't have taken the time to research myself.  However, since it's now drawn some attention, it's fun to see what kinds of historical facts and photos come up.

I'm modelling coal operations in the 1960's, but I'm using bottom-drop hoppers.

If Walthers is making a working rotary dumper, does that mean someone is also making rotary-joint couplers for those cars?

[whitman500]

Why not do a Google search?  Or on Wikipedia?  You can do it yourself.

I already have.  Google brings up nothing that is helpful.  The entry in Wikipedia is a stub that says nothing about when they were introduced.  Maybe next time you can give people the benefit of the doubt instead of assuming they're lazy or stupid.  In return I'll try not to assume you're a jerk.

[jeffrey-wimberly]

This site has a pic of one around 1920

http://www.ohiohistory.org/etcetera/exhibits/ohiopix/image.cfm?ID=5424

 

[cacole]

It was nothing like the modern ones, but the Denver & Rio Grande had a primitive rotary dumper to transfer loads from narrow gauge to standard gauge gondolas that was built in the latter part of the 1800's.

[csmith9474]

Why not do a Google search?  Or on Wikipedia?  You can do it yourself.

Perhaps someone here has some immediate or useful info.

I suppose the same could be said for just about any question asked here.

[Railphotog]

Why not do a Google search?  Or on Wikipedia?  You can do it yourself.

[whitman500]

I saw that Walthers is releasing a new working Rotary Dumper and I was thinking of adding this to my layout set in the late 1950s.  Would this have been too early for a Rotary Dumper?  When did they come into use?