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Upon rereading what I wrote earlier, I think I should clarify that I've only seen the term "balloon track" used to describe a loop that sits to the side of a main track, as opposed to a loop at the end of a line. The latter would merely be a loop track. I've also seen it used to designate a track that connects the two legs of a horseshoe curve. The last example I am aware of the latter is at Fir, the summit of La Veta Pass on the Rio Grande line to Alamosa, though the switches to it are gone. I think this term originally arose to describe a track whose principal function is to turn a train without a reverse move. Much later, the term was appropriated to describe a track whose principal function is to load or unload a train, and only incidentally turns the train as well. In fact, in many instances of the latter the train doesn't turn, especially at the unloading point: the road power drops the train off and sometime later, after the train has been dragged through the unloader (rotary or rapid-discharge) by the plant switcher, the road power comes back and couples to whichever end is convenient. I've seen plenty of coal trains come back out of the plant in reverse car order from when they went in, proving they never turned. And on even more reflection, I think the derivation of the term balloon track comes from the fact that the track "balloons" to the side of the main track -- it swings way out, then comes back. In other words, the balloon comes from the verb form, not the noun form. But a half-hour looking through the railway engineering texts on my bookshelves does't come up with anything to substantiate that -- or deny it. All of the Powder River Basin mines in Wyoming and Montana have loop tracks for loading trains. All of the Hanna Basin mines in Southern Wyoming did as well (all are now inactive for rail loading), but the Black Butte Mine over by Point of Rocks does not -- its valley is too narrow. In Colorado and Utah, approximately half of the mine loadouts have loop tracks; the remainder being restricted by narrow canyons to a runaround operation. As I run through power plants in my head, I can't think of any of any size that do without loop tracks, except in some eastern cities.
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