What is the reason for the message stenciled on the side of some freight cars, “Do not hammer on side of car”? Equally important, what happens if someone does take a hammer to the side of the car?
Covered hopper? Best guess from me is that it has a food grade coating on the inside that striking from the outside can cause to come off, contaminating a load. Hammering the outside of a hopper is a common way to attempt to get material the is bound up inside it flowing again.
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Are ‘Air-Slide’ covered hoppers still being manufactured to aid in the unloading of dry commodities?
Some covered hoppers have brackets welded to the hopper openings to attach a pneumatic vibrator to it at the unloading site. I imagine some granular materials will get packed in pretty tight after a long journey over rough track and even rougher switching.
CEMX 11071 Covered Hopper 2 bay cement by Steve Cox, on Flickr
Regards, Ed
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I was a welder/fab man and worked tankers many years and the cones or hoppers would get disform and eventually get cracks from hitting them with big maul to get product to flow that’s how they came to get vibration disc in hoppers activation by air through a rubber cone
A hundred years ago (give or take) I started my working life in the coal yard at the power plant . (Pay was meh but it was all the coal you could eat.) I was there for the transition from steel to aluminum rapid discharge hoppers. In freezing weather, which does happen occasionally in North Central Florida, the coal would freeze to the walls of the car. That brought “hammer time.” Later they installed a car vibrator on a wench over the dump station. The aluminum cars mostly solved the discharge issue but every now and again the car shaker did its thing. Best part is it was in close proximity to the smoking pad and when the shaker roared to life the cancer clutch would run for cover. Good times.
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I worked at a nearby military installation that hosted a cogen plant. It was supposed to heat the entire installation, but the sandy soil apparently corroded the pipes, so that idea died an early death.
The main event: The cogen ran on coal and petcoke. As mentioned, the product would sometimes come in frozen (by rail). They did have a car shaker, though, and it would also shake/vibrate nearby buildings.
Eventually they converted to biomass, which pushed the price of firewood up. The chipped material all came in by truck. Even that operation has ended…
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When I worked the Operators position at the B&O’s Lester, OH station it was heated by a coal fired pot belly stove in the middle of the Operators room. Company would supply a yearly load of coal - Operators would supplement the coal with Coke that fell off coke trains that operated past the station. Burning the coke improved the heat production at the expense of much higher grate wear.
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