Jeremy Taylor’s excellent book continues to be a very informative and enjoyable read. Automotive never really interested me, but finishing the chapter, it became very obvious there was an automotive system in place with Conrail that was very complex. It gave an insight to the problems that industry faces, domestically.
Now comes chapter three and the discussion of coal traffic. Already there are a few questions.
First, in Conrail language at least three terms are used to describe lines (in Taylor’s book) - line, branch, and secondary. What is a secondary line?
(edit); just ran across another term “running track”. Help with that please.
Second, the first photo describes a very unusual movement of coal by Conrail of 8.5 miles from the Amex mine near Mt. Carmel, Il to the Gibson power plant just across the Wabash River. Taylor notes that Conrail shared the business with NS. Conrail in the early 90’s delivered nearly 4million tons. The train shown was 80 loads. That works out to about 450 trains per year according to my slide rule.
Is that operation still in existance? It was noted that NS lost their portion of the business to trucks. Is that still accurate?
This kind of operation seems like a great shuttle type operation for a short line. Would the shear volume of that operation appeal to a class1 railroad? It would to me…particularly if the utility owned the locomotives and cars.
Whatever ConRail said they were. More seriously - although maybe not much more helpful, because I’m not aware of any formal defintions - here’s how I would describe them from observing them in the field over the years;
Secondary is a branch line ‘light’. The Catasauqua and Fogelsville [‘C and F’] Secondary - which you now know from the other week - is one. In general, I’d say they are up to around 20 miles long, only 1 train on it at a time, unsignalled, mainly serving several towns with industries, with a yard of some kind along the way or at an end. The Cement Secondary from Bethlehem north to Bath and Nazareth, etc. is another.
Running Track is just a glorified industrial lead - single track, not very long - say 1 to 3 miles, serving a collection of industries off of it, usually only at a single town, no yards, etc. - same or similar to ‘Industrial Track’. I believe that the freight tracks that parallel Amtrak’s NorthEast Corridor on the outside of that main were known as Running Tracks, but that may have changed.
Both of these are subject to clarification and correciton by someone with better knowledge of the criteria and classifications for these - oltmannd comes to mind, especially.
No, not yet - skimmed it when it first came out, but having lived through a lot of that, didn’t see the need a the time. Now a little older and wiser, and more interested in other aspects of the business, seeing what you have to say about it after just a couple of chapters - it’s on my ‘Must Read’ list now.
If you are really interested in the economics of transportation…what is being transported and where this is an excellent book.
The format is excellent in my opinion. Taylor provides photography (solid photos, not necessarily spectacular, but informative) for the trains described, including an amazing amount of information such as locomotives, loads, empties, tonnage.
To me it is amazing he was able to gather the loads/mts/tonnage…and keep all this information. There is a big difference between the sizes of PRB coal trains and the PA/WV coal trains. The eastern coal trains seem to be around 80 cars, while the PRB were around 115 at the time, now even larger.
Anyone know why the eastern coal trains were smaller? Does it have to do with loadout facilities?
More like “the entire infrastructure.” As a result, at least until recently, most eastern Class 1 coal cars did not have Grade E drawbars. It’s a long story, but if you step back to the 100,000-foot level and look at history, traffic patterns, geography, and distances, the economic equation east of the Mississippi incentived a shorter maximum train tonnage and length than west of the Mississippi.
The most important difference is that a substantial infrastructure had been developed east of the Mississippi to move coal since the late 1800s, whereas the western infrastructure was in many cases naive to heavy coal prior to the 1970s, except in southern Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, and northern New Mexico. Thus when coal appeared literally from zero in the PRB in the 1970s, 100% new infrastructure had to be built on many primary coal lines, and even 70-90% new on lines as far away as Texas. Since it was all new-build, there was no economic reason to not build for as big a train as possible. But in the east, there was lots and lots of existing infrastructure already, and the economic incentive to remodel it to handle the size of trains that the West was now generating just wasn’t there.
The distance and the nature of the movement is very similar to the “T-Bird Shuttle” operated by DM&IR (CN) for United Taconite in Northern Minnesota. The T-Birds shuttle 110 car trains of crushed Taconite Ore from the Thunderbird North loadout (hence the T-Bird name) to the Fairlane processing plant. The trains currently make one roundtrip per shift. When things were really hopping they were completing two round trips per shift. There also was a Thunderbird South loadout at one time until the mining activity ended on that side of the Ore body.
A secondary is more of a secondary main track. The very busy Port Road was a “secondary” but so were the former PRSL tracks, e.g. Beesely’s Point Secondary, Penns Grove Secondary, Vineland Secondary which had one or two round trips and a few locals on them.
It mostly had to do with mountains. Nearly all the eastern trains went up and over the Alleghenies. About the best you could do was 90 cars with grade C couplers and 135 with grade E. They’d haul these trains to Enola and rebalance things, building larger or smaller trains depending on the route to the destination. Trains to Chalk Point that went off the NEC at Bowie had to make it up the B&P tunnel while trains to Indian River on the Delmarva secondary could be longer.
I do think there were also limits at the receiving end of things, but I don’t know any specifics.
The Mt carmel Il To gibson power plant is now all served by Norfolk Southern and has been since the late 1980’s. They have 3 ingoing trains to the plant a day avg of 100 bethgon hoppers. Also 3 out going trains a day.