We just got back from a 10 day trip to the Colorado Rockies west of Denver. I have a few questions, for those in the know:
Mountain railroads (wow!). We rode a tourist train, the Leadville, Colorado & Southern, from Leadville to near Climax and Fremont Pass. This line, DSP&P/CS/BN, is literally notched into the side of a mountain. What I found interesting, was that the line had some ups and downs to it (and one wicked, tight horshoe curve!). Why wouldn’t the builder have cut the line in at a steady grade? Was the up and down grade meant to somehow make train operation easier?
The tourist line goes almost to a molybdenum mine at Climax. It closed about 20 years ago, and BN sold the line to the tourist line. The mine is to re-open in a year or so, providing 1,000 mining jobs. It seems like 1,000 mining jobs should equal a lot of mining output. Would it be feasible, to re-build the LC&S for approx. 15 miles to haul ore to the UP(DRG) line near Leadville, or is it inevitable that this traffic will hit the highway full of tourists?
Coming home, we saw a UP train in the canyon, near Hot Sulfer Springs, about 20 miles west of the Moffet Tunnel. To my surprise, the train consisted of 14 sooty UP locomotives, and no cars. Any good explanations for that?
What to locomotives have to do, to overcome the altitude/less oxygen situation in the mountains? I know it tough on us flatlanders!
Murphy: Mines extracting any metallic ore other than iron and aluminum are these days working some very low-grade deposits. The Climax deposit is a disseminated ore body similar to most of the major copper, silver, and gold deposits being mined today, with actual mineral content of the ore being on the order of 1% or lower. Freeport-McMoRan, the parent company, expects to extract 30 million lbs. annually of molybdenum sulfide (M0S2) in the initial phase, doubling to 60 million lbs. annually if things go well. 30 million lbs. works out to two truckloads daily loaded to 80,000 lbs. GVW. While that 40 tons daily of output is extremely valuable, freight rates are based principally on cost of service and value of service and only to a small extent on the value of the commodity (and that’s an insurance factor only).
Inbound materials consumed by open-pit hard-rock mining are remarkably light, consisting mostly of diesel fuel to run the machines, and diesel fuel and prilled ammonium nitrate to mix into explosive slurry. Some pipe, cement, structural steel, etc., may be consumed, and reagents for leaching or concentration.
I think what you saw on the Moffat was a light power move to reposition units back to Grand Junction (or less likely the Craig Branch) for eastward coal trains. Coal trains on the Moffat run 2x3x1 for 105 cars; but the empties don’t need but 3 units. If the railroad is power-short elsewhere and the coal empties that would need them when loaded are not on the horizon – or the empties are there but the mines have no coal to put in them in the immediate future – there’s good reason to take the units out of the coal pool, put them into something useful, and when loaded moves resume, collect the necessary power and deadhead it back to Grand Junction to be emplaced into empties to head out to the mines and load.
Has the mining process drastically changed since the mid 80’s? I understood that BN kept the line to Climax open just for hauling the ore from the mine. If that’s true, they were shipping very short trains. What would 80,000# of M2S be worth?
No, Climax was an open-pit mine then and now, converting from a block caving system in the 1970s. BN kept the line open because it was open; there was no economic cost to rehabilitate it and deal with permitting as there would be now. Also that was the regulated era and rates were higher. The Climax train rarely ran more than 6-8 cars each way – loads of cement, steel, chemicals up; MoS2 concentrate down. (Ore was not moved by rail, only the concentrate which is nearly pure MoS2.)
The concentrate is worth roughly $30/lb. at present, so if there was 200,000 lbs. in a covered hopper, it would be worth $6 million. However, assuming you didn’t derail the car into a river where it burst open and washed away, it would be difficult to destroy or lose it.