Does anyone know how many of the tank cars seen in the pic link below are still in active service? I haven’t seen anywhere near as many of these behemoths as I did three years ago. It seems that their 6-axle cousins have already disappeared from the the scene…
DUPX 29743
http://www.rrpicturearchives.net/showPicture.aspx?id=1311556
as far as I know, all of them are still rolling, unless some got wrecked. The 6 axle ones are still running, but certainly not the 16 axle jumbos, because they were to big, and they were limited to where they could go.
What would they haul?
chemicals.
Omaha, Nebr. - Tuesday, 9 Sept. 2008.
There’s one on display at the National Museum of Transportation near Saint Louis. Their’s is painted white and red and I’m pretty sure it was stencilled for Dupont. The car is approximately 94-ft. long and the owner retired it when the A.A.R. banned any equipment, whose rigid center sill was over 90-ft. long, from interchange service.
Dupont=chemicals. That much I got. But simply more of one kind or some heaver, slury type of chemical?
Most of the six-axle DUPX tank cars have been retired; only three are left in the 29600 series, all of the cars in series 29400-29439 are gone.
The eight-axle cars in series 28050-28090 (which were used for motor-fuel anti-knock compounds) have all been retired, however I count 60 of the 70 from DUPX series 29700-29769 still around.
I’m pretty sure that all of these cars will be victims of old age before too long.
There used to be a web site called “Railwhales” that documented these large tank cars from all operators, but it has apparently been taken down.
One used to see a lot of these monsters on the C&O between Russell, Kentucky, and Charleston, West Virginia. I can’t recall the commodities that were transported in these cars, but I’m pretty sure they weren’t often seen in smaller cars.
The car in the museum at St. Louis is a GATX tank car, the largest ever built, and it carries markings for Phillips Petroleum. I think it has a capacity of about 60,000 gallons. Compare that with the 43,700-gallons-plus of the eight-axle tanks in the DUPX 29700 series.
Good info Carl! I had a feeling almost all of the 6-axle versions had been retired. FWIW, all of these cars I’ve seen carry Ethylene Glycol (think “antifreeze”), and are interchanged from UP onto CSX. The train this car was in is headed back to UP. I’ve noticed that most of these cars are over 40 years old, so I dare say they won’t be around for much longer either.
Used to see alot of them in the Buffalo / Niagra Falls erea, but now the ones i see are converted to 4 axle cars [ie one truck under each end]. But the tanks still run as 4 axle tanks.
Too bad because I likd the 6 and 8 axle cars.
We used to get a lot of similar tanks, painted white, in Waynesboro, Va. Haven’t seen one in years. They used to haul a chemical called Anhydrous Ammonia (check the spelling), but, we just called them “Annie Hydride” cars.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen one of the large 8-axle tank cars converted to run on four-axle trucks; the capacity and weight are just too much for it to be practical. Monsanto and Celanese used to have some six-axle cars with a smaller tank capacity, but they’re getting up there in years, too, if they still exist.
Anhydrous ammonia is a fairly common tank car commodity in these parts (component of fertilizer), but I’ve never seen it carried in anything but four-axle cars (capacities as high as 34,000 gallons).
…Trying to remember when we’ve seen such kinds of tank cars…It certainly has been a while. By my memory, I’ve seen 6 and 8 axle tanks go thru here on the CSX east / west line but as I said, not for some time now…Perhaps a year or maybe more. They were quite obvious because of such large size.
Here is the Rail Whales web site.
I’m not sure weather it is 6 or 8 axle cars that were converted to 4, i didn’t keep that detailed track of it, but the 4 axle versions look rediculusly disproportionate.
Anychance you have a miss spell here? I tried to copy and paste several times and I get a error message.
Thanks,
Jared
That was Mike Palmieri’s website. The address was correct, but I believe he has taken it down.