I believe most if not all of the aluminium hoppers (some steel as well?) such as Freight Car America’s autoflood line built over the past few decades have rotary couplers.
I’ve seen EOT’s mounted to rotary couplers turn completely upside down during their trip.
Re drop-bottom gondolas…A century or so back smaller coal dealers often preferred to get coal in drop-bottom gondolas rather than hoppers. Many smaller dealers didn’t have a coal trestle, they just had the car dump the coal where it sat on their spur track and then moved the coal to bins themselves. A hopper car dropped the coal straight down on the track, making it harder to get to. On a drop-bottom gondola, the door hinges were normally towards the middle of the car so when opened they doors directed the coal out along the sides of the cars.
Plenty of “wine door” high-side drop bottom gons floating around here. Never saw one used to drop something out the bottom. Just another gon.(With a slightly higher center of gravity)[D]
A hopper is defined as a “self clearing bottom discharge” car. Anything that does not fit all parts of this description is not a hopper.
If the bottom is solid, regardless of the actual shape of anything, it’s not a hopper and falls into the “gondola” classification.
Our coal fleet contains a mix of hoppers and gondolas. Our trains are always rotary dumped, so the hoppers are not needed and I’ve only ever seen the doors cause trouble.
The mixed up trains make loading difficult, as the hoppers have a slightly higher tare weight and are shaped differently inside, the loadout operator has to pay close attention to which type of car is next in order to avoid spills and overloading or unbalancing a car.
This is true for aluminum cars, out here the previous standard was 58’, which is the length of all CP, CN and BC Rail’s steel coal gondolas. Thunder Bay and Prince Rupert still have dumpers capable of handling the longer cars, not sure about other locations.
The dumpers must have been modified at the two Vancouver-area sulphur terminals a few years ago
Wasn’t the size of the rotary dumper an issue for the original EMD and the first Tier 4 SD70?
ET44AC’s have issues with some dumpers as well, they are not allowed on trains destined for Roberts Bank (Westshore terminals) in Vancouver, and also do not fit through some loading facilities.
Santa Fe had a notch cut into the upper corners of the cab roofs on some of their units for this reason, specifically the coal loadout at York Canyon, NM had very tight clearances. The notch is most prominent on safety cab GE Dash-8’s, I’m not sure how many other units got it.
The bigger problem was the design engineer at York Canyon (newer tower loadout flood tipple) and also at Holcomb KS used the profile of a MoP SD-40 instead of a Santa Fe unit of the same type. The notoriously cheap MoP had no beacons, radio masts, d/b’s or air conditioners above the cab. Santa Fe or Espee units took a beating for a while (and OMG did the Espee Tunnel motors get low-ridered through those two places and also the run through shop doors in La Junta (old coach and cars shop building.)
When a coal train is being loaded or unloaded, is the railroad’s engineer making the moves? Or is a coal company engineer making the moves?
If it’s the railroad’s domain, is a RR conductor radioing the engineer for the placement of each car, one at a time?
How long does it take to unload a 100-car train? And load?
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.
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.
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
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.
Thanks, Dude. Very instructive.
Balt, thanks for linking those videos. I’ll definitely watch them tomorrow.
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.
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 de
[quote user=“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 a