When mountain biking in the Rogers pass along the C.P. main line I came across what appeared to be a gravel pit where they probably got their ballast from. There was some old ballast cars that had been there a very long time along with a little bit of very old equipment. I was wondering what the equipment would look like that would be used to make ballast in these small quarries? It would make for an interesting scene along my 15’ rogers pass in 1957.
Brent
The pit might also have been used for rip-rap, embankment armoring material, or general fill. Ballast pits these days are few and far between because there is so little rock that is really good for it. But in 1957 the criteria was much looser. The pit might have supplied all three needs. Railroads use a tremendous amount of what is called “classified fill” to armor embankments, repair washouts, raise low spots, and build new track and facilities.
Pit-run ballast takes nothing but a shovel to remove it, truck to take it to a wash plant, and another shovel to load it into rail cars. The wash plant would consist of a grizzly (a steel box with bars across the top to reject oversize material), a conveyor to take the material from the grizzly to a trommell (a nearly-horizontal, rotating steel barrel with holes in the side for dirt and water to wash through but not holes so large that the gravel falls through too; the material feeds in, water drenches it from sprinkler heads, and the clean gravel emerges out the bottom end), and a stacker conveyor to take the material from the trommell to the stock pile.
In 1957 the shovel for a pit producing pit-run material would most likely be a “rope shovel” such as a Bucyrus-Erie or Marion 20-ton to 40-ton shovel mounted on caterpillar treads and diesel-powered, with a D6- to D8-size dozer to strip off topsoil and cleanup, and rip the material if it was consolidated. Today it would be a hydraulic excavator of the 30 to 40-ton class to dig the material out of the face, a D6 to D7-class or larger dozer to remove overburden and rip consolidated material, maybe an articulated dump truck, and a wheel loader to load out of stockpile into the rail cars. If there was a crushing plant it would usually be small (maybe 100-200 tons per day output) and usually portable and diesel-powered.
Crushed ballast takes a fairly elaborate crushing plant. Big and expensive for any sort of large-production operation.
Hi Batman: That pit sounds interesting. Did you get any pictures? I’d like to see them. I’m a member of the Historical Construction Equipment Association and interested in old construction equipment espicially when conected with railroads.
For some atmospheric photos of steam shovels at work at ballast pits, the steam traction website
has articles with pics, such as:
http://www.steamtraction.com/archive/4106/
A famous ballast pit here in Wisconsin is at Rock Springs – that is where the Chicago and North Western’s “pink lady” ballast came from. There is a wonderful website with aerial and historic photos that is a great source of scenery ideas:
http://www.geology.wisc.edu/~maher/air/air14.htm
Dave Nelson
Thanks for your replies. The pit we came across was a few miles from any pavement and was reached along a service road that at times was nothing more than a trail as it was so overgrown. The pit was probably about 200’ in diameter and carved out of solid rock (granite?). There were about twenty what looked to be rotory dump cars around 20’ long full of 2’ diameter rock in them, parked on a overgrown siding. They were probably rusted to the rails[;)] The equipment inside the pit was really rusty and could have easily been a hundred years old. There was also a grizzly bear about a hundred yards away down in the river. I really do wish I had taken my camera that day. There was lots of bear poop in the pit and so we didn’t hang around long and saw the bear as we headed out. You can feel the history in your bones when you bike along remote stretches like that. The C.P.R. is not so worried about cleaning up after themselves in areas not seen by the public and that suites me just fine.
Brent
That’s rip-rap you saw. If there was any ballast production from the pit, you’d have seen a pile of the fines from the crushing process. The air-dump cars you saw that are already loaded, are an on-call, ready resource in case of a washout or flood. They may have looked to have been rusted to the rails, but if someone needed them, they’d have been on their way to the washout within a matter of hours, not days or weeks.
RWM