There is hardly any pig iron in these gondolas being delivered to CSS. Is it really that heavy a material or is it a customer decision to not load the gondolas even to the half way point?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VfN8JIgxDZc
You'll notice in the overhead shots that most of the material is piled over the trucks.
Yes, it's that heavy.
For a long time, the taconite (taco) trains going throught Deshler were using regular hoppers. They were loaded much the same. Now those trains are using ore cars (much shorter) which are loaded more fully.
Any time you take the air out of the material, it does get awful heavy. Again, at Deshler, a regular train is the slabs of steel that are simply stacked on flat cars equipped with braces to keep them from shifting. No sense tying them down - nothing would hold them if the car tipped (as in a derailment).
Coil cars get very heavy, too.
Larry Resident Microferroequinologist (at least at my house) Everyone goes home; Safety begins with you My Opinion. Standard Disclaimers Apply. No Expiration Date Come ride the rails with me! There's one thing about humility - the moment you think you've got it, you've lost it...
Ferrous ores and products are HEAVY; always have been and always will be.
When moving ore trains out of Sparrows Point and/or Curtis Bay when I was working in Baltimore Terminal - to look at the cars (regular hoppers) it just looked like a cut of empty cars - as it moved past your location you got the creaking and squeeling and all the other sounds of heavily loaded cars moving on the track.
Never too old to have a happy childhood!
I've seen magnetite shipped in similar gondolas, they'll only have two similar size piles but the car will still weigh out at over 140 tons.
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Iron weights about 500 lbs per Cubic foot. In a 100 ton capacity gondola that would be 400 cubic feet of iron. If the interior of the car is 10 feet wide and 50 feet long, a capacity load would be about 10 inches high.
OK, thanks for the feedback, I never knew it was so dense and heavy.
Reminds me of a story told in an architecture structures lecture. This was in a warehouse built with mushroom-headed reinforced-concrete construction, and I believe occurred during the WWII years.
it was noticed that there was a certain amount of spalling from the faces of columns on the ground floor. There seemed to be nothing wrong with the concrete chemistry or fabrication, so each floor began to be checked for damage.
Turned out that someone had been warehousing little tin ingots, bringing them in in small loads and stacking them innocently on the floor. They had gotten to only about 3' height and were happily anticipating more when detected...
Assuming the ingots were mostly metallic 'white' tin as stored, that was about ¾ ton per square foot floor loading...
OvermodReminds me of a story told in an architecture structures lecture. This was in a warehouse built with mushroom-headed reinforced-concrete construction, and I believe occurred during the WWII years. it was noticed that there was a certain amount of spalling from the faces of columns on the ground floor. There seemed to be nothing wrong with the concrete chemistry or fabrication, so each floor began to be checked for damage. Turned out that someone had been warehousing little tin ingots, bringing them in in small loads and stacking them innocently on the floor. They had gotten to only about 3' height and were happily anticipating more when detected... Assuming the ingots were mostly metallic 'white' tin as stored, that was about ¾ ton per square foot floor loading...
Back in the days when the B&O was transitioning into Chessie System the main corporate offices were moved from the B&O Building that was constructed in 1905 to replace its predecessor that was destroyed by the Great Baltimore Fire of 1904. The offices were moved a block to the North into a building constructed as a part of Baltimore's 'Urban Renewal' in the early 1960's. The intent had been to move EVERYTHING to 100 N. Charles, however, once the footprint weight of the corporations Main Frame computers was looked at, it was found the 1960's building could only support the computers on either ground floor or the sub basement, instead of the 11th to 13th floors the occupied in the 1905 B&O Building. My understanding is that the computers were considered to have a 50 pounds per square foot rating - the new building had a 25 pounds per square foot rating.
The computers remained in the B&O Building, through its redevelopment into office suites by a developer after the building was deeded to the City of Baltimore. The computers remained there through at least the first decade and a half after the creation of CSX Transportation. At the time the B&O/Chessie IBM computers were considered the 7th largest system in the world, or so I was told.
I worked as a computer operator on those computers. They were the IBM 1401 computers. They had vacume tubes, were huge and VERY heavy. Learned my trade on those monsters. Very crude by todays standards, but fun to work with.
Danny Harmon's 'Distant Signal Productions' made a pilgramage to Central Ohio and documented it with the following video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1p9E6fVyeU
The video shows several trains/cars loaded with various 'bulk' steel products. It is evident in how little of the cubic space of the cars is occupied by the load that indicates the weight of ferrous metals.
BaltACDDanny Harmon's 'Distant Signal Productions' made a pilgramage to Central Ohio and documented it with the following video
Good stuff at Deshler, of course. And the banners/maps I got for the park are still looking good after well over a year. Of course, they're up on the "ceiling" so they don't get the weather.
Here's a website that lets you calculate how much a metal load weighs, based on shape. http://www.calculatoredge.com/matweight/material%20wt.htm It doesn't take a whole lot of steel slabs to reach the weight capacity of a typical flatcar.
--Steven Otte, Model Railroader senior associate editorsotte@kalmbach.com
Having observed the Interlake Steel (now Cleveland Cliffs) bottle train since the mid 1960's, the weight of those monsters was demonstrated by the number of wheels on each car (smaller cars had 16 wheels, the larger ones have 20-24) and the spacer cars used to distribute the weight over several bridges.
The CStPM&O once loaded a DM&IR wooden gondola with lead ingots that were roughly cube shapes about 24" square by 18"-20" high. Several of them are claimed to still be buried at the wreck site on the then C&NW line though Eden Prairie, MN. As train #20 headed westward (by compass) one of the ingots broke through the wood floor of the car, and piled up about 20-25 cars. Several of the ingots just got lost in the shuffle of all the dozer work to put the roadbed back together.
If you think pig iron is heavy, metals such as gold, tungsten and uranium are a bit more than twice as dense as iron. Mercury is pretty dense as well, as lead will float in it.
Erik_Mag If you think pig iron is heavy, metals such as gold, tungsten and uranium are a bit more than twice as dense as iron. Mercury is pretty dense as well, as lead will float in it.
Since they've dropped lead from gasoline any more, you probably won't see many around, but the tetraethyl (?) lead cars are pretty small compared to other tank cars on the railroads...
I can actually remember driving by the Bayway refinery and seeing those blue-and-white midget tank cars.
Tetraethyl lead has four C2H5s bound around one lead atom, and when it combusts it goes to finely divided lead oxide, which was supposed to plate out on the ground fairly quickly, being so dense, but didn't. Relatively little concern until you started to have millions of cars getting 8mpg... then oh, brother.
Loony gas was innovated by the same fellow that brought us the Freons. Some websites rack him up as the greatest mass murderer of all time...
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