It depends on each individual location.
In western Canada the train crews on both CN and CP used to remain onboard at many locations as the train was loaded, with the engineer moving the train under direction from the loadout operator (a couple locations required a trainman to be in the loadout along with the operator). During the pre-HOS era this resulted in some very long and lucrative trips, as if problems were encountered the loading process could take an entire day, not to mention the trips to and from the mine.
Most locations now have contractors or onsite employees to load the train, a few are able to remotely control the locomotives from the loadout (GE calls this feature "Tower Mode"). A few still use the railroad's crew.
Our coal and sulphur loadouts all use a flood loading process where the train is kept constantly moving at a very slow speed, from 0.1 to 0.7 mph depending on the loadout and daily conditions (are we loading from the silos or the outside stockpile?). Some locations may load even faster if the silo is directly above the track.
To do this the locomotives need to be equipped with a feature called Pacesetter, which is best thought of as cruise control. Different types of locomotives with different versions of Pacesetter may not be compatible with each other.
0.25 mph is about 4 hours loading time for a 100 car aluminum train. The loading time is calculated fairly easily using the length of train and your speed, but it can vary widely depending on what kind of delays are encountered.
No idea how long unloading takes.
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-an Articulate Malcontent
For the most part unit trains are loaded by 'flood loading'. The railroad crew pulls the empty train so that the first car is spotted at the loading chute. Once loading commences, the train will be moved at a specific slow speed (in the neighborhood of 1 MPH +/-). The Conductor and/of Load Out Foreman will have radio contact with the engineer if the train needs to be stopped for any reason. Under normal circumstance it will take somewhere between 1 & 2 hours to load a normal sized unit train.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEkT-lO9wIk
Never too old to have a happy childhood!
Unloading bottom dumps
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8EonnNaFC
Dumping with a rotary car dumper and loading ships
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhwvXIOkoBY
Hulett's unloading ore boats
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RJfnk2S330
SD70Dude It depends on each individual location. In western Canada the train crews on both CN and CP used to remain onboard at many locations as the train was loaded, with the engineer moving the train under direction from the loadout operator (a couple locations required a trainman to be in the loadout along with the operator). During the pre-HOS era this resulted in some very long and lucrative trips, as if problems were encountered the loading process could take an entire day, not to mention the trips to and from the mine. Most locations now have contractors or onsite employees to load the train, a few are able to remotely control the locomotives from the loadout (GE calls this feature "Tower Mode"). A few still use the railroad's crew. Our coal and sulphur loadouts all use a flood loading process where the train is kept constantly moving at a very slow speed, from 0.1 to 0.7 mph depending on the loadout and daily conditions (are we loading from the silos or the outside stockpile?). Some locations may load even faster if the silo is directly above the track. To do this the locomotives need to be equipped with a feature called Pacesetter, which is best thought of as cruise control. Different types of locomotives with different versions of Pacesetter may not be compatible with each other. 0.25 mph is about 4 hours loading time for a 100 car aluminum train. The loading time is calculated fairly easily using the length of train and your speed, but it can vary widely depending on what kind of delays are encountered. No idea how long unloading takes.
Tell us about these "sulphur" gons. I have never heard of it being shipped in other than liquid phase.
It's too bad there are no Huletts still standing. I think two have been preserved, in pieces. It's a wonderful operation to watch - so graceful.
The local military base here hosted a cogen plant. After CSX delivered trains of coal or coke, the plant's NW2 switcher would pick up groups of 10 to 12 cars at a time to be dumped. The loco was set up for remote control, as in the video.
Of course, NW2's are elder statesmen. On the tail track headed into the bottom dump shed, you could see oil spots one car length apart from where the loco sat while each car was dumped.
In the winter, especially, you could feel the car shaker in nearby buildings...
Watching the Deshler cam brings the occasional train of eastern met coal - all nicely groomed as seen in the video.
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Thanks, Dude. Very instructive.
Balt, thanks for linking those videos. I'll definitely watch them tomorrow.
tdmidget Tell us about these "sulphur" gons. I have never heard of it being shipped in other than liquid phase.
They're the same as coal gondolas.
Solid sulphur is shipped in chunks the same as coal. There are unit train movements of the stuff in western Canada from producers to Pacific ports for overseas export.
http://pct.ca/our-operations/sulphur-movement/
Sulphur is solid at room temperature and has to be melted with steam heat to load/unload from tank cars. But most small-batch domestic shipments of sulphur is in tanks.
Chris van der Heide
My Algoma Central Railway Modeling Blog
Alberta and British Columbia are the only places I know of in North America that ship bulk solid sulphur in rotary dump gondolas or hopper cars. Sultran's fleet has always been 100% gondolas, but before they acquired their own cars sulphur was moved in railroad owned hoppers, which were hated by both customers and crews as the doors leaked and the older cars had lots of slack and air brake problems.
Sultran's steel fleet comprised two types of cars, both built to the same designs as CN and CP's steel coal cars.
SULX 1000 series (CP design). Truck mounted air brakes, handbrake only applies on the B-end truck:
https://www.pwrs.ca/archive/dyn.Mar_12_2007_Sultran_PWRS_Special_Run.php
SULX 2000 series (CN design). Normal body mounted air brakes, handbrake applies on both trucks, but the wheel mechanism is at the top of the car:
https://www.pwrs.ca/announcements/view.php?ID=6185
Sultran later bought some steel coal cars from CP and converted them for sulphur service, they were numbered in the SULX 3000 series but were otherwise identical to the 1000s.
Sultran started switching to an aluminum fleet about 6 years ago, and their final steel cars were retired about 2 years ago. The aluminum cars are not new, but were purchased secondhand from several American owners, notably the square bodied SULX 5000 series came from Detroit Edison. The 4000 and 6000 series are the typical round-bottomed cars that are so common in coal trains across North America.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/25409219@N02/14448675653/
https://www.flickr.com/photos/121621563@N04/31516533474/
While they are built to the same designs, coal and sulphur cars are not immediately interchangeable between services. Each product contaminates the other, so the car must be cleaned first. The steel sulphur cars had an epoxy lining to prevent corrosion, coal cars do not have this (aluminum cars seem to do ok without any lining).
tdmidget SD70Dude It depends on each individual location. In western Canada the train crews on both CN and CP used to remain onboard at many locations as the train was loaded, with the engineer moving the train under direction from the loadout operator (a couple locations required a trainman to be in the loadout along with the operator). During the pre-HOS era this resulted in some very long and lucrative trips, as if problems were encountered the loading process could take an entire day, not to mention the trips to and from the mine. Most locations now have contractors or onsite employees to load the train, a few are able to remotely control the locomotives from the loadout (GE calls this feature "Tower Mode"). A few still use the railroad's crew. Our coal and sulphur loadouts all use a flood loading process where the train is kept constantly moving at a very slow speed, from 0.1 to 0.7 mph depending on the loadout and daily conditions (are we loading from the silos or the outside stockpile?). Some locations may load even faster if the silo is directly above the track. To do this the locomotives need to be equipped with a feature called Pacesetter, which is best thought of as cruise control. Different types of locomotives with different versions of Pacesetter may not be compatible with each other. 0.25 mph is about 4 hours loading time for a 100 car aluminum train. The loading time is calculated fairly easily using the length of train and your speed, but it can vary widely depending on what kind of delays are encountered. No idea how long unloading takes. Tell us about these "sulphur" gons. I have never heard of it being shipped in other than liquid phase.
sultran
Similar but different
Loading a ore boat.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLU3l0Fwcoo
Taconite pellets are much easier to dump than raw iron ore was. Iron ore often has a high moisture content, and can stick together and refuse to go out the bottom of the ore cars. In cold weather, the whole car could freeze into a solid mass. Pellets are like marbles, they just roll out.
It wasn't clear to me from the video. Once the rotary dumper does its thing, what does that coal fall into? Does it go right onto a routable conveyor belt that takes it to piles or bins, from which that other belt takes it to the ships? I have to assume that the dumper does not move, so since there is finite space under it, the coal has to be kept moving.
Lithonia Operator It wasn't clear to me from the video. Once the rotary dumper does its thing, what does that coal fall into? Does it go right onto a routable conveyor belt that takes it to piles or bins, from which that other belt takes it to the ships? I have to assume that the dumper does not move, so since there is finite space under it, the coal has to be kept moving.
Yes - regardless of where it goes, it'll go by belt in the vast majority of cases. But...
Some ship loading facilities dump(ed) straight into the ship, such as was seen on the ore loading video. Due to the lack of room on many docks, cars would often be dumped singularly, then would roll further onto a kickback arrangement and roll back to the empties track.
I had the privilege of observing flood loading from the loadout control room at a mine in Colstrip, MT a few decades ago. Still ranks as one of the most impressive things I've seen.
I thought I had a solid idea of what constitutes a hopper and what constitutes a gondola until Lithonia posed the question. The coal cars BN used extensively in the 70's and 80's were obviously gondolas, as they had no capacity to unload from the bottom. Now many of what are called gondolas have the characteristic box shape, but have dump bottoms.
Just to add to the confusion, I do recall seeing coil cars classified as either AAR Class FMS or GBSR, which would make them either flat cars or gondolas.
If you look up the history of the Bethgon, some of the structural and design advantages of bathtub gons can be seen more clearly. Arranging secure-enough lateral drop-bottoms on low-tare highest-capacity aluminum cars is a silly exercise from the beginning unless you explicitly need bottom-dumping ... in which case you would buy aluminum hoppers, take the hit in capacity per unit as needed, and keep the ability to put switches on each car to dump continuously (a modernized version of the old Oliver system with the funky truck tires on the cars!)
Many years ago I worked in a coal mine near Pittsburgh - Mathies Mine - and all coal haulage above and below ground was via rail using 20 ton gons. The gons had one rotary coupler and the electric engine, just called a motor, would haul 50 or more cars out to a rotary dumper at a dock on the Monongahela river. The cars would dump into a pit and the coal moved via a conveyer to a barge. The barge then headed up to the coke ovens for off loading. Very effective. Most underground mines used conveyor belts exclusively.
Back in the mid 90s while an engineer for GE in Virginia we did a rebuild of the coal loading system for NS at the Lamberts Point dock. NS cut 2 gons at a time and a gadget called a barney hooked to a steel cable pushed them into a 2 car rotary dumper. Two 100 ton gons were dumped in under a minute if all was working properly. Then conveyers took the coal to waiting ships for dumping into open holds. Really neat.
We had to decommission some existing structure and needed huge diamond cutting saws to remove some truly over-engineered concrete pedestals. Added huge high horsepower electric drives to operate the barney. Very successful project. NS liked it all so much we were asked to automate the conveyers which eliminated most all of the direct dumping into the ships.
Rich
I would have said the same thing, coal hoppers, gons for other stuff not piled high, did not realize there were so many different kind. When I think of a gondola, I remember riding with my parents in an open gon on Q steam trips pulled by #4960. When the gon was at the end of train not as bad, as when it ended up behind the tender on return trips. Could feel the cinders raining down on us as she chuffed along. Dad got one in his eye and Mom got her hankie out and was able to get it out, I wore eyeglasses so never had a problem. Those were fun times for sure, and my memories of a gon.
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