Expensive Yellow Ballast

[Victrola1]

The corn on the railroad track going viral on Facebook? It's real and in Crystal..

http://www.startribune.com/the-corn-on-the-railroad-track-going-viral-on-facebook-it-s-real-and-in-crystal/566783462/?refresh=true

[tree68]

I can see where that could have been messy had it been left in place for the animals to discover.  

A number of years ago, a truck hauling fresh produce wrecked in the median of the Interstate.  DOT figured the fruit, etc would "disappear" on it's own.  It did - the problem was the animals crossing the highway to get to it.  After a number of animals (including deer) were hit, it was decided that they'd better clean it up after all.

Might have been interesting in the spring if that corn was capable of sprouting, too...

[mudchicken]

Can't read the article (Their sales pitch and Mr. Firewall are not friends)  but:

(1) Corn or milo will grow in dirty ballast. The Loram equipment was a suck-truck or a ballast cleaner?  FRA will write you up for fouled ballast.

(2) Depending on what spills/leaks out there from other railcars, you can get an unwanted chemical reaction. The smell (or worse) can be ugly. (There was a case of that in non-leaking containers involving ww/stp pellets from New Jersey going to a landfill earlier this year. That same stuff blew up in a former grain bin out here while being used as fertilizer. (Amity, CO).... The chemical reaction can also ruin treated timber ties.

Edit: Saw the story on another source. The Loram equipment was a 24-stone grinder, so that's not much help (unless you want iron-infused popcorn) ... Bet a Vactor suck truck (made at Streator IL on the west end of the bypass) with hi-rail gear will be called out now that people are wandering around trespassing on the R/W. The grinder was just coming or going home at Fairibault? (Loram HQ)...Best to get after it while the corn is still dry.

(Leave the corn out there long enough and Bambi & Ballou get snockered; Smokey is a Teatotaler, AFAIK)

[adkrr64]

A few years back, the east yard lead to the Dewitt CSX yard had a thin strip of what looked like grass growing between the rails for as far as the eye could see. Evidently, there was a hopper leaking seed of some sort as it was entering the yard. Must have been an annual, though - it did not reappear the following year.

[jeffhergert]

It's not unusual to see grain, meal, or chemical products spilled from covered hoppers.  If it's been going on for awhile, you can tell where the car had been stopped.  There's a bigger pile in the trail.

I can recall a car of phosphoric acid leaked across Iowa.  It made the news with a lot of hoopla, probably because of the 'acid' part, of the danger to the public from the leak.  While you could see the trail, it wasn't a lot in any one spot.  

More recently, a tank car of tallow leaked for about 10 miles along the main and into my home terminal yard.  Of course it was summer time and didn't take long to start smelling in the yard.  Although the wood ties looked shiny and new for awhile.

While the yard in Council Bluffs had a "clean up crew" of turkeys and deer mostly, I don't really see a lot of critters out in the rural areas.  While there are still turkeys in the yard at CB, not as many as there once was.  A coyote or two moved in and have thinned out the turkey population.  

The coyotes have also kept the road runner population down, too.

Jeff 

[ChuckCobleigh]

jeffhergert

The coyotes have also kept the road runner population down, too.

"Beep, Beep!"

There is a stretch of (now former) ATSF line parallel to I-215 by March AFB (now reserve field) that I would drive by that I called "squirrel country safari" because of all the squirrels dining on grain that had leaked on the way to a couple of feed processors. I don't know if enough grain is delivered now to contribute to the buffet and traffic is heavy and fast enough now to make peeking at the track an unwise idea.

[CShaveRR]

Oh, man...

It really doesn't take too long for that stuff to rot and start smelling terrible.  And if you had the misfortune to step into the residue, it was not only smelly but slippery, and your fellow employees would shun you because of the way your boots smelled.  I remeber spending a cold winter's night outside the cab because the engineer wanted nothing to do with the smell.

Things used to be worse back in the days of box cars, when the grain doors didn't do a good job of keeping the grain in the car.  I guess it could hapen on any aged car that the side itself contained holes through the grain could leak.  And, of course, in the yard, impacts sould cause a temporary or permanent opening through which grain could spill (sometimes engulfing and immobilizing the car).

We used to keep the suck-truck pretty busy.

The problem in the yard more or less went away with unit grain trains, but we had other things replace it.  The most insidious was bentonite clay, which was fine enough to sift through even the tiniest leak in a car's gate or crack in the side.  We were told that while working in the yard we should arm ourselves with a 10-ounce bottle of the company's drinking water, which we could open and squeeze over the leak, often eliminating it.