I was looking at the UP line near Hanna, WY via Google Earth and noticed an abandoned mine branch line northwest of Hanna. On closer inspection, I saw it jam packed with freight cars. Approx 1500 of them. Anybody have any additional info about this?
Mine? Probably abandoned due to no more recoverable ore.
RR – branch line not abandoned maybe out of service. Great place to store excess cars.
With the current economic down turn all the major carrier have part of their car fleet stored because they simply don’t have the business to support having the cars in revenue service.
Remember…1000 Fifty foot cars require 50,000 feet of track space…nearly 10 miles. The Class I carriers have many thousands of cars currently stored.
When most people hear the numbers of cars and/or locomotives stored, they hear a number and they don’t equate that to the reality that all those stored cars/engines must occupy real track space somewhere.
Miniwyo: where art thou? (Dormant, not abandoned, former Union Pacific Coal & USS/Transtar property - plenty left in the U/G mine, need the right price to compete w/ Powder River surface coal…)
The branch is relatively new, built in 1976 with secondhad 133# welded rail. The mines closer to Hanna (Hanna #1 and Hanna #2) closed by 1973- Hanna #1 had an ugly explosion/fire in the past.
Sure, I clicked on and wandered around Hanna, not the most beautiful town in the world, then west to the tracks, sure enough many, many, many,many cars, I went right to the end, BIG loop which was neat, now who said 1500 cars, I’m sure there are more, go ahead and count them.
i love to look at google maps… the country around hanna is very rugged
the cars seamed to be a mixed bunch not just coal or intermodal
you can see that it is a mine due to the loop however i could not see any sign of a loadout
its interesting that the mines are closing… over here in australia we are still in the boom cannot get enough miners the local coal industry has grown by 8000 in the last year and we are very short of miners so if you know a miner who wants to work in australia check us out
Every available siding in Arizona is crammed with excess rolling stock due to the financial downturn and lack of rail traffic. Out here we have long strings of covered hoppers, auto racks, and empty well cars that have been sitting on sidings for over a year now.
A shortline near me had upwards of 1300 cars stored around their system at one time. They changed character from time to time (at least what I could see on a portion of their property I passed regularly). Last time I went through there the visible cars were gone. I think there is some limit on how long a railroad can store cars for another railroad - not sure if it’s a legal thing or a contractual thing.
While stored cars are a negative for the railroad which has to store them, they can be a real boon for the storing property if the railroad with the excess cars pays someone to hold them for them. Figuring even a dollar a day per car for 1000 cars, that’s $30K per month for using track the storing line may not be using in the first place. It certainly pays the property tax, and maybe even some of the wages.
Methinks that standard demmurage rates would apply for cars held in storage. Could be why so many owners are opting for their cars to be cut up for scrap on site.
Methinks that standard demmurage rates would apply for cars held in storage. Could be why so many owners are opting for their cars to be cut up for scrap on site.
I may be wrong, but my understanding of Demurrage, is when someone, BESIDES, the car’s owner or company leasing said car, delays the car for longer than an expected amount of time, is charged a penalty. This could be the recieving customer taking too long to unload a car, or a car that dwells too long in a yard, rather than being routed towards home in a timely manner when empty.
Again, this is just my understanding, but if the owner of the car, or company leasing the car, does not have enough demand for the car, and decides to store the car, then Demurrage would NOT apply, because it was the Owner or Leasee that chose to park the car. They may pay another company a daily storage fee, if stored on someone else’s property, but that is a different fee than demurrage.
During a traffic down turn, a railroad may decide to scrap cars, for various reasons, such as not expecting enough demand for a class of car when traffic increases, such as 40’ box cars, and smaller capacity covered hoppers, as some examples. The price of scrap steel will also come into play, in the store/scrap decision.
Doug
Demurrage is a charge between the Carrier and it’s customer, where the customer holds onto the car for a longer period of time than is allowed by the carrier, be they tariff specified or contract specified rules.
Per Diem (which is now a hourly charge) is the charge that accrues to carriers for having foreign line equipment on their property. When a CSX car is on UP property, no matter the reason, UP pays CSX the per diem amount associated with the specific car. These charges work all ways between all the carriers and the accounts are electronically accumulated and settled between the carriers on a periodic basis.
When it comes to storing one carriers cars on another carriers trackage, neither of the foregoing charges apply. The carrier with cars to store will negotiate a track lease with the holding carrier. The holding carrier will pay no Per Diem on the specified cars that are being held on their property. The storing carrier will pay the holding carrier charges that are specified in the lease agreement for the privilege of storing their cars on the holding carriers track.
The Vol. 24, No. 1 [Winter 2010] issue of The Streamliner, published by the Union Pacific Historical Society, has a 17-page article about Hanna, Wyoming and the coal operations that were once a busy part of The Overland Route’s traffic base.
The stored freight cars most likely are on the 15.2-miles long Medicine Bow Mine Lead. As discussed previously in this thread, this mine lead probably isn’t abandoned, it’s just dormant for now.
On a somewhat related note, during the late summer of 1975 I remember driving along some state highway in the vicinity of Vale, Oregon. Then a dormant Union Pacific branchline was filled with what I imagined were several hundred freight cars - mostly cushioned drawbar boxcars, ordinary boxcars, flats, bulkhead flats, and some woodchip cars as well. I was really surprised to see how many cars were in storage then.
Back in the '70s, the Lamoille Valley (>Vermont Northern, >St. Johnsbury & Lamoille County, nee St. Johnsbury & Lake Champlain) stored a lot of “Per Diem” cars on un-used trackage. The local felons discovered them and would go, of a night, jack up the cars and steal the brass journal bearings. Luckily, they did get caught! I haven’t heard of that problem with roller-bearing cars. Some of the inter-modal cars are coming out of storage, at least in Montana. Good sign!
Hays