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Balloon track vs siding/spur
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(I had a whole long parsed response, but it got caught up in the abyss of cyberspace, so this will have to suffice...) <br /> <br />Tree: Do you or do you not agree that the railroads are forcing the issue regarding 110-car vs 26 and 52 car loading facilities? Hmmmm, that would be a "trend", wouldn't it? Which facilities are more likely to require a balloon track? The ones feeding the longer consists, or the shorter consists? <br /> <br />And BNSF regularly employs DPU's on it's PNW-bound grain shuttles, mudchicken's denial to the contrary. <br /> <br />It comes down to a matter of convience for the railroad at the cost of convience to the shipper. <br /> <br />The question of push/pull via DPU's vs the pull-through facility is a minor point. And no one said the "requirement" by the railroads for balloon track designs came from the engineering specs. Certain people tend to read more into these topic questions than are actually there. The bigger question is why existing elevators of relative newness and sufficient design for the shorter shuttles are being wasted in deference to the more expensive facilities? Some of those 26 and 52 car loaders are barely a few decades old, hardly depreciated. Whose to say that these newer more expensive 110 car loaders won't be a wasted investment in the future as railroads use their pricing power to force the construction of 160 car shuttles? I can see it now, instead of balloon tracks, these supermega facilities will require a double "Tehachapi" type loop system to fit such long consists into the existing real estate and road crossing constraints.
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