I was driving by DTE Energy's Trenton Channel Power Plant today and saw maybe 10 coal cars on their side on the loop track for the unloader. Here's the location: http://binged.it/1Bj8nI6 . Anybody heard anything on this? Local news is silent so far. Cars were tipped away from the road, so I don't know if they were full or empty. Normal procedure there appears to be for loaded cars to be on the north side of the loop and for a radio-controlled DTE engine to push eastward (clockwise on the map) to run the cars through the dumper. If that was happening today, I doubt that it'd be a case of stringlining. Coal trains are usually BNSF, but I didn't drive around to look for the locomotives to confirm it this time.
Once upon a time, I knew of a certain power plant where such events just seemed to occur with amazing regularity around the major holidays - fortunately, mostly track damage and just some wheels on the ground, nothing as severe as this. It was just too bad that the unloading crews then had to work so much overtime to clean up the mess and catch up with the backlog that ensued while the dumping operation was at a standstill . . .
- Paul North.
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