...why is that and what do the colors signify? I've often wondered.
Thanks
Ted M.
got trains?™
See my photos at: http://tedmarshall.rrpicturearchives.net/
Ted Marshall wrote: ...why is that and what do the colors signify? I've often wondered.Thanks
The colors signify which side of the car is equipped with a rotary coupler. The rotary coupler allows the train to be dumped without being uncoupled.
An "expensive model collector"
Those are cars with rotating couplers at one end, for use in rotary dump service. The colored end denotes which end has the rotary coupler. There needs to be a rotating coupler at each end of the car or cars on the rotary dumper, it would be very bad to try to rotate a car on a dumper without the proper couplers.
Doug
May your flanges always stay BETWEEN the rails
Usually the rotary coupler (and therefore the colored end) is found on the A end of the car (the end where the hand-brake wheel isn't). Occasionally, though, a car will be built or modified to have rotary couplers at both ends. This permits an entire train to remain intact when it has distributed power at the hind end (the double-rotary car can be anywhere in the consist, so long as the cars at the end of the train have rotary couplers next to the locomotives.
Back in the good old days (1970s or thereabouts), the big aluminum coal gons of Detroit Edison were expected to remain pretty much in numerical order. To this end, the odd-numbered cars had rotary couplers at both ends, and the even-numbered cars had no rotary couplers. It didn't work very well apparently, because nobody else (including Detroit Edison on later purchases) did it. You can still see some of these cars in scrap-metal service for various companies (especially AMG Resources--reporting marks AMGX).
Carl
Railroader Emeritus (practiced railroading for 46 years--and in 2010 I finally got it right!)
CAACSCOCOM--I don't want to behave improperly, so I just won't behave at all. (SM)
Okay...Thanks guys. Does that mean that the coal is not discharged from the bottom of the car instead the cars are 'rolled over' one at a time, hence the need for a 'rotary' coupler? i'm trying to imagine the process, but I'm drawing a blank here. Also, why the different colors?
Ted Marshall wrote: Okay...Thanks guys. Does that mean that the coal is not discharged from the bottom of the car instead the cars are 'rolled over' one at a time, hence the need for a 'rotary' coupler? i'm trying to imagine the process, but I'm drawing a blank here. Also, why the different colors?
Never too old to have a happy childhood!
It depends on the car, and the unloading facility.
There are hoppers with bottom dump doors and rotary couplers. They can be unloaded "conventionally" at receivers that don't have a rotary car dump, or turned over at those that do.
Other cars don't have bottom dump doors and the only way to empty them is by turning them over. These cars technically aren't hoppers but gondolas. Carl and the other freight car experts would probably know for sure, but I think most new cars being built for unit coal train service are this type.
Jeff
Ted, I'm trying to remember whether it was in this forum that I saw an extensive series of rotary-dump pictures, but I couldn't find any in my quick search.
Many of the coal cars in use today are gondolas--there's no way they can be emptied through the bottom. I suspect, though, that many plants in your part of the country have opted for bottom-discharge humping with air-actuated hoppers. Even so, you'll find that many of the hoppers have rotary couplers on one end, so that they can be used at locations where rotary dumping is the only option.
I've seen just about every color imaginable on a rotary-coupler end. No purple yet, though, and I'm sure that the pink I saw was just faded red.
Oh...Okay. It's starting to make sense, the cars are somehow rolled over and then set upright again on the rails. Still trying to imagine how that's done, but, for now that satisfies my curiousity.
Carl, your suspicions are correct. We don't have any coal fired power plants this far south and there is practically no coal traffic on South Florida rails. Fuel oil and natural gas power plants are most common in Florida. We also have at least two nuclear power plants down here. There are only a handful of coal fired plants that I know of. They are in Indiantown, Satellite Beach and Orlando, the closest still being over one hundred miles from where I live.
From what I have seen coal is delivered in open hoppers which discharge from below into a pit covered by steel grate. I believe what you're describing is what I've heared referred to as a 'bathtub' gondola, typical in scrap metal service down here.
Three basic methods of moving coal by rail:
1. Cross hoppers with manual doors ("cross" because the doors run across the car), typically four for a 100-ton car. The doors have latches that are manually operated, the doors swing open by gravity, and after dumping the doors are closed and latched by hand. The advantage of this type of car is that it is inexpensive, durable, and can be dumped virtually anywhere, even at a "facility" as basic as right on a team track, and shovel out the contents that fall on the track by hand. They can be rotary dumped if fed into the dumper one at a time, and rotary dumpers designed for this type of car were constructed at coal piers such as Norfolk, Toledo, and Chicago, and at many steel mills with rates of 2,000-3,000 tons per hour. They continue to be used by numerous industrial customers and small power-plants. Only a relative handful have been constructed with aluminum bodies. The Pocohontas coal roads built vast fleets of these in 50-ton and 70-ton size, most of which are now gone. N&W, UP, MP, D&RGW, C&O, PC, SR, IC, and BN built immense fleets of this type of car in the 100-ton size, most of which are still in service on successor roads. Not very many were built for private owners, but quite a few are now in lease fleets such as Helm. This type of car with a steel body is suitable for moving taconite pellets and often are used in that kind of service. With taconite they tare out long before they cube out. They are useful for coke but for that commodity they will typically cube out before they tare out. They are also used for bauxite, copper concentrate, and other finely crushed minerals, but really don't have the door opening size to be suitable for aggregates or other large-diameter minerals. Any time a commodity is switched the car has to be cleaned. Conrail rebuilt a large fleet of 90-ton cross-hoppers into rotary-dump gons.
2. Rapid-discharge hoppers, which have air-actuated doors that are electrically triggered to open. Virtually the entire bottom of the car opens almost instantaneously. The advantages of rapid-discharge is very fast unloading and the dumping facility is not expensive as it needs only an elevated trestle. The train is pulled intact over the trestle. A shoe is extended ("ungagged") on the side of the car. This shoe comes into contact with a raised rail as the cars moves into the appropriate place for dumping. That completes an electrical circuit which triggers the doors to open. The restriction on the speed of dumping is the speed of the conveying mechanism in the pit; dumping rates of 20,000 tons per hour can be achieved. Power plants with high coal demand rates and limited space for coal dumping loops are advantageous for rapid-disharge, as well as older plants where the expense of a rotary dumper is not justified. The disadvantage of the rapid-discharge car is that it is much higher in tare weight than an equivalent rotary-dump gon, so that every round trip it makes it moves 2-3 tons less of coal. It's also higher in initial cost than a rotary-dump gon and higher maintenance. Rapid-discharge cars were perfected in the 1960s but were not purchased in large numbers in the steel-car era. Large numbers are now in service with aluminum bodies. Many of them have rotary couplers to give them the versatility of serving a power-plant that is rapid-discharge or rotary-dump, and accordingly they have the same standard dimension over pulling faces as a rotary-dump.
3. Rotary-dump gons. These can only be dumped by overturning in a rotary dumper, or by digging out the contents with an excavator. The advantage of a rotary-dump gon is it is inexpensive, durable, and has the lowest possible tare weight for a given cubic capacity. The disadvantage is it can only be efficiently used at a rotary dumper, and rotary dumpers are slow and expensive to build and maintain. A single-car dumper usually has a throughput of 4,000 tons per hour and a tandem (2-car) dumper, which is not too common, has a throughput of 6,000 tons per hour. For some coal plants that's just too slow, and for certain coal plants with locations not far from the mine, the extra dumping time has a cycle-time penalty that puts the coal train over a threshold on crew hours; the extra crew can make a rapid-discharge set more cost-effective. Rotary-dump gons first appeared in large numbers in the late 1960s for long-haul coal moves for met coal and steam coal, both in the U.S. and Canada. The "bathtub" gon is a design that features a depressed center between the trucks as opposed to a flat-bottom design. It's a trade-off of tare weight, construction cost, and durability, and for a steel car there was never a clear-cut winner one way or the other. Aluminum-body coal gons appeared in the 1980s and once they were proven in service, orders for steel-body gons ceased. (Aluminum-body coal gons as well as aluminum-body rapid-discharge cars have steel underframes.) The rotary dumper is a $16-25 million expenditure to build. Not only does it require maintenance, but when it breaks or malfunctions, coal deliveries cease until it's repaired, which might be several weeks if the malfunction or damage is serious. A rapid-discharge system in contrast is very hard to disrupt -- even if the conveying system breaks the coal can always be moved with wheel loaders, and the doors can be opened and closed manually. Many steel rotary-dump gons have been downgraded to scrap metal, hazardous waste, crosstie, and aggregate service; for most of these services the car is unloaded from the top with a magnet, claw, or bucket attached to the boom of an excavator. Some hazardous waste dumps have rotary dumpers.
Some notes.
1. Aluminum-body cars are very soft compared to steel and aluminum gons and hoppers are unsuitable for almost anything except coal. When they are retired there will be nothing to cascade them to.
2. Western railroads ordered almost every 100-ton hopper with high-strength couplers. Eastern roads other than notably the Clinchfield did not, and the Conrail 90-ton homebuild bathtub gon conversions had regular-strength couplers. That rarely presented a problem except when eastern cars "crossed the Chinese Wall" at Chicago or St. Louis with met coal from West Virginia or Pennsylvania for Geneva Steel in Utah. Getting them over the mountains on the D&RGW required either splitting the train in two at Pueblo, or mid-train power, to keep from exceeding coupler strength. Backhauling coal east presented the same problem. This is also the reason why eastern cars haven't often shown up in "second-owner" service in the west, with the exception of cars that were originally intended for west-to-east coal moves such as the Upper Merion & Plymouth cars, and the aforementioned Clinchfield cars.
3. Some of the early aluminum cars had issues with top sill failures in rotary dumpers, as well as carbody design failures such as side-sheet separations. The evidence is reinforcements.
4. Probably the best steel car ever designed of any type was Bethlehem Johnstown's 100-ton four-door cross hopper, built in many variations in cubic capacity for just about everyone. Absent the AAR 50-year rule I think many of these would outlive me. A strong, tough car, about the only way to damage one is to wreck it.
5. There was something about the IC or its territory that killed coal cars. Every IC steel hopper I ever saw had severe side-sheet corrosion issues at the bottom of the sheets, and on some the bottoms of the side sheets were flapping in the breeze. Coal mines stuffed rags, sticks, and tin cans into the gaps to keep the coal from dribbling out, or just outright rejected them.
RWM
Railway Man wrote:<snipped> 5. There was something about the IC or its territory that killed coal cars. Every IC steel hopper I ever saw had severe side-sheet corrosion issues at the bottom of the sheets, and on some the bottoms of the side sheets were flapping in the breeze. Coal mines stuffed rags, sticks, and tin cans into the gaps to keep the coal from dribbling out, or just outright rejected them.RWM
<snipped>
High sulphur coal when wet leaches sulphuric acid. Illinois Basin coal has high sulphur content.
beaulieu wrote: Railway Man wrote:<snipped> 5. There was something about the IC or its territory that killed coal cars. Every IC steel hopper I ever saw had severe side-sheet corrosion issues at the bottom of the sheets, and on some the bottoms of the side sheets were flapping in the breeze. Coal mines stuffed rags, sticks, and tin cans into the gaps to keep the coal from dribbling out, or just outright rejected them.RWMHigh sulphur coal when wet leaches sulphuric acid. Illinois Basin coal has high sulphur content.
Very true. But L&N cars hauling the same rotten Western Kentucky coal didn't seem to have this problem. MKT cars, now that I think about it, also had side-sheet issues. Perhaps it was the combination of high-sulfur coal and hand-to-mouth finances.
After a litttle bit of research over at www.rrpicturearchives.net and from your replies I've learned that some rotary-coupler equipped cars are hoppers and some are gondolas. AAR Type J311 seems to be the most commonly used gondola, easily indentified by the depressed floor between the trucks vs. having 4 or 5 hopper doors. Type K340 hoppers do not have rotary couplers, but Type K341 hoppers do. Both types are used to haul coal and are the types of cars that I do see down here from time to time.
Thanks to everyone for enlightening me on the subject of rotary dumping, a technology that I was totally unfamiliar with until tonight.
Railway Man wrote: 2. Western railroads ordered almost every 100-ton hopper with high-strength couplers. Eastern roads other than notably the Clinchfield did not, and the Conrail 90-ton homebuild bathtub gon conversions had regular-strength couplers. That rarely presented a problem except when eastern cars "crossed the Chinese Wall" at Chicago or St. Louis with met coal from West Virginia or Pennsylvania for Geneva Steel in Utah. Getting them over the mountains on the D&RGW required either splitting the train in two at Pueblo, or mid-train power, to keep from exceeding coupler strength. Backhauling coal east presented the same problem. This is also the reason why eastern cars haven't often shown up in "second-owner" service in the west, with the exception of cars that were originally intended for west-to-east coal moves such as the Upper Merion & Plymouth cars, and the aforementioned Clinchfield cars.RWM
I should have said, "rarely presented a problem from my parochial perspective as a west-of-Chicago railroader." I had always presumed Conrail knew what they were doing for their territory. I didn't realize they had migrated out of Conrail territory post-merger. My sympathies!
Resurrecting a very old thread. Just watched a coal train pass an online railcam with colored markings on opposite ends depending upon which side you were viewing. The sides closest to the camera all had markings on the trailing end of each car. As the train rounded a bend, and the opposite sides of the cars came into view, all the markings were on the leading end of each car. This was true for the entire train - not due to some double-ended transition car somewhere in the middle.
In this case, what do the colored markings signify?
AjsikResurrecting a very old thread. Just watched a coal train pass an online railcam with colored markings on opposite ends depending upon which side you were viewing. The sides closest to the camera all had markings on the trailing end of each car. As the train rounded a bend, and the opposite sides of the cars came into view, all the markings were on the leading end of each car. This was true for the entire train - not due to some double-ended transition car somewhere in the middle. In this case, what do the colored markings signify?
As a matter of switching with such cars - the instructions will be to have the painted ends, on the side you are switching the cars from, to have the painted and all in one direction.
In most switching things are arranged so that the switchman works from the Engineers side of the locomotive, thus the switchman views his cars from that one side.
Coal cars with painted ends have rotary couplers, so the cars can be rotated for emptying. If you end up with cars with painted ends together, or non-painted ends together - one of the situations will have standard couplers coupled together and thus the cars cannot be rotated.
But what he's reporting is that he sees the colored end painted on the A end of the car on one side and the B end on the other, which would mean rotary couplers on both ends if the older definition applied. If designating a 'rotary end' the same color would mark that end on both sides of the car.
OvermodBut what he's reporting is that he sees the colored end painted on the A end of the car on one side and the B end on the other, which would mean rotary couplers on both ends if the older definition applied. If designating a 'rotary end' the same color would mark that end on both sides of the car.
Understood - however, as I stated cars are only viewed from one side to determine if the train is 'correctly' coupled. From whichever side the train is viewed - you don't want to see EITHER painted or unpainted ends paired together. Doesn't make any difference if the A or B end of the car has the rotary coupler - it makes no difference if the A end Left side and B end Right sides are painted.
They could be going to a site that uses bottom dump and have the rotary couplers pinned.
rdamonThey could be going to a site that uses bottom dump and have the rotary couplers pinned.
The Bathtub design of coal cars CAN NOT be bottom dumped. There are no bottom openings.
For anyone with access to the Fort Madison camera, this train can be viewed by rewinding to 8:22AM CDT this morning.
Were they hoppers or rotary gondolas? And where on the car are the coloured spots you're talking about?
Greetings from Alberta
-an Articulate Malcontent
Looking at the video, it look like the stripe is on the two sections that have the reporting marks. It is hard to see from the video if they have any special marking on the end.
Our community is FREE to join. To participate you must either login or register for an account.