Hrmf. Well, since all this trying-to-understand-something looks like it’s starting to irritate people, I will just go ahead and try to them out right mad [swg] The reviews for the models don’t mention any details about doors on the woodchip cars, so lets just go ahead and ask, how are these doors hinged? Side hinged? Top hinged? Diagnoly hinged? Is it the whole end thats hinged? Just the wood chip extension? Just the drop-end of the gondola? Did I tick anyone of yet [(-D] But in all serious I am asking to gain knowledge on the subject, not just to be annoying, although I may have tried that a little (pff, diagnolly hinged, I can see the posts now, “yea buddy well maybe your head is diagnolly hinged, so it swings right up your…”). Someone mentioned about top hinged but I wasn’t quite sure what part of the car they were reffering too.
Look for the hinges on the car or a picture of the car.
Normally 3 general configurations on wood chip cars.
Hopper car. Regular hopper doors on the bottom of the car, hinged at the top and dump on or between the rails…
Gondola car. No doors. Turn it upside down to unload it.
Gondola car. End door, the car could be hinged on the top or hinged on the side. Lift the solid end of the car up in the air and dump the chips out the other end.
So what would you call one of these? It has slope sheets, and bottom doors (hinged across the width of the car), so is it a hopper?
You could call it a boxcar (that’s what they were made from).
You could call it a drop bottom gon.
You could call it a hopper.
The CofG classed it as a “woodchip” car type K140 (1971 ORER), which is an “equipped” hopper car type HTS with less than 154,000 lbs capacity.
It looks like they extended the sides of a 40 ft boxcar, welded a plate over the door, put in a slope sheet and added drop doors, with door mechanisms off WW1 era hopper cars . Its a prototype 100% kitbashed, homebuilt car.
Third option when you have limited facilities: end ramp & front end loader:
That’s the best option I’ve yet seen! [swg]
Anyone know if this was a one off operation or if anyone else used the same method?
Would I be right in thinking that the door is winched open using a winch supported on the fram in the foreground?
Any other “interesting” arangements?
[8D]
As long as you want to unload one chip car at a time. I rather doubt a paper mill would use this method (unless it was a extremely small paper mill), it would take a huge amount of switching to spot each of the 30 or 40 cars of chips a day that a typical paper mill would use, one at a time. None of the papermills I have been associated with used this method, all were bottom dump mills.
All end door cars would have to be emptied one car at a time. Clearly this would be a lot quicker switching the cars onto a tipping machine rather than unloading them with a digger… but still a lot of switching. It always surprised me that they ever went for an end door variant.
The McNeil Station in Burlington, VT is a 50 Mega-watt bio-mass fueled electric planet belonging to Burlington Electric. It gets it’s fuel via trailer trucks full of wood chips and via a 2-to-3-times a week 20-car wood chip unit train. All of the railcars belong to BE. The NECR delivers them to a strictly gravity dump at the plant. In the last few years it has been modified to also use Natural Gas, and they will soon be using both the Gas and Wood Chips together to make the plant more efficient, ie, produce more power with the same amount of fuel.
To see the entire plant, visit the Burlington Electric McNeil Station in Burlington, VT
Bing has a nice aerial shot, complete with a wood-chip train going thru the unloader ! The Bird’s Eye doesn’t have a train.
McNeil Station in Burlington, VT
Gil
ConocoPhillips’s Santa Maria, CA petroleum refinery ships raw petroleum coke via railroad hopper car. This fine-particulate product is loaded into railroad hoppers using a railroad-car-sized front loader. Custom-built metal covers for the hoppers are used to prevent the product from blowing away while in transit. The covers are removed for loading and unloading of the product. The coke is shipped to a southern California port where the hoppers are unloaded not through the hoppers, but by turning the cars upside down. Gee, hoppers cars treated as gondolas and “disguised” as covered hoppers while in transit.
Mark
ConcoPhillips Santa Maria refinery’s only finished products are petroleum coke and sulfur. The refinery process sour, heavy coke. The semi-refined product, after sulfur and coke extractions, are shipped via a 250-mile pipeline to the company’s Rodeo refinery for further refining. Company policy prevented me taking photos within the refinery grounds at Santa Maria, but satellite shots should show the large piles of sulfur and coke within less than a mile south of the refinery. The sulfur is used as a fungicide on local vineyards, and the coke is shipped overseas to be used as fuel.
I’m reviving this old thread in the hopes that Lonewoof could possibly reload his blanked out picture, from a hosting service that currently works, please! I’m looking to build up a fleet of chip cars, not requiring a rotary dump. Dan
I “opted out” of reading this whole topic. Intermountain makes woodchip cars based on drop-bottom gondolas:
http://www.intermountain-railway.com/distrib/redcaboose/html/RR-35203.htm
They come in several roadnames. You could also build your own.
In particular, note that they do not require a rotary dump, since they have the doors.
Ed
Not sure what lonewoof is describing. Could it be
Ballast Hopper
http://www.angelfire.com/il/cnw/open.html
Or
Coalporter
Thank you for the replies and further photo support. Since I posted that request, I realized that I don’t need the cars to unload at my chip pile. It could be used to LOAD the hoppers, gons, converted box cars, AND the ship at the dock. To this day a large chip facility in Coos Bay loads ships and rail cars. It is fed by chip trucks, and I could scratchbuild a few, enough to easily represent the trucks-in, rail and ships-out transfer.
Modern day method, I know, uses large cars built just for this purpose, but I’m modeling the early days of stopping the burning of waste material and chipping and using more. So converted cars will suffice.
I remember the trucks in my youth running highways 42 and 101 in Oregon with a slogan on the backs of the trailers; “We Haul Smoke” Dan
Ed,I suspect those SP&S drop-bottom gondolas was used for sugar beets not wood chips.
Oh, no. The SP&S homebuilt their various conversions specifically for woodchip service. I believe they even bought some UP drop-bottoms and did the same.
Now, on the SP, there surely were sugar beet cars that looked pretty much the same. I once “rescued” a sugar beet from the truck sideframe of one of them.
Ed
Ed,As you know GN and SP&S ran solid sugar beet trains.There was a article in Trains magazine many years ago covering sugar beet trains that’s why I thought that SP&S gon was a sugar beet car.
Larry,
I’ve not heard of SP&S handling solid sugar beet trains, or generating any sugar beet traffic. I’d sure like to hear more. From a map of sugar beet growing, it looks like there’s a little bit around Pasco, so maybe some could come from there.
I went back through some articles on the SP&S cars. They were all built for use as woodchip cars. And were so assigned.
I suppose it’s possible that some hauled sugar beets on occasion. If the cars are available, and there’s a need, why not?
Oh, yes. Besides the SP&S woodchip car by Intermountain/Red Caboose, there’s also the Intermountain Caswell cars. SP&S converted some of those, too.
Ed