We usually see 2-3 trains during the day on BNSF past my place of work. Today there were 3 between 8:00 am and 11:00. All three were long unit trains of empty ethanol tank cars heading back to their home planets. There are half a dozen ethanol plants within 50 miles of me. This afternoon I read that because of COVID-19, … economy…blah blah blah, Poet was temporarily shutting down 3 ethanol plants, including the one at Chancellor, S.D., 25 miles down the line. Our gas prices are currently about $1.69. I saw gas last week in N.W. Iowa at $1.56 a gallon. I know that ethanol thrives when gas prices are high. Is ethanol in trouble?
Meme recently seen on FB: How many weeks per gallon are you getting?
There’s a lesson in this somewhere. Throughout the United States, ethanol is now a ‘key’ health material, one of the better viral disinfectants (at about 78%) – yet is unavailable even to essential businesses without a great deal of under-the-table convincing and haggling. Even isopropanol has become a scarce and likely price-gouged material.
And yet we hear there’s no point in continuing to produce it, even though I suspect the output of at least one of those plants could easily be sold into the current market at what are likely the highest margins in many years for industrial alcohol.
Makes me wonder who is setting the policies/incentives and watching the logistics in this evolving ‘situation’. (Meanwhile people volunteering to help with ventilator fabrication get no offers … but it seems there’s plenty of demand fabricating better corpse-handling machinery. It would be hard to make this stuff up.)
This was in my little town’s paper this morning. It was an e-edition, so I couldn’t copy it, and it’s a pay site, so I just took some screen shots. Sorry.
Anyway, the ethanol plants are working with the University of Nebraska to produce sanitizer.
In Michigan they closed the bars and dine-in restaurants, and craft distilleries are using their excess alcohol to make hand sanitizer.
Same here in my area. There’s two quart bottles of “moonshine” at the fire station, plainly marked “food grade sanitizer…”
Holy COW! The times they are a changin’! [:^)]
Saw on the news last evening… A news piece aout Jack Daniels Lynchbyrg,Tn,they have converted one of their distilleries over to making ethanol for HAND SANITIZER! [:'(]
A long time ago, in that fabled “…Galaxy;Far, FAR, away…” a tip of ‘Jack’ with water by it, was a drink of choice. Then my doctor, said it was bad for me, and it would do ugly things to my body… [sigh] I guess now, I’ll just set a blottle of Jack Daniels Hand Sanitizer on the counter, and think about the good, old days…[:-^] [see link]@ https://sports.yahoo.com/jack-daniels-ramps-production-hand-210617411.html
[:'(] [banghead]
Murph, it sounds like you know the turf and the situation, so I don’t doubt they are empties.
But I’m curious: can you tell whether a tank car is full/empty just by looking at it?
And are there “tells” re other cars, also? For example, covered hoppers.
The biggest ‘tell’ is knowing traffic patterns. If you get close enough to view the spings on the car you can see them more compressed on a load than they are on a empty. If you have a fine ear you can hear a different sound between loads and empties as sound waves resonate differently between loaded and empty cars. The third way is to listen to the wheel/rail interface in the track structure - you hear sounds in the track structure created by the additional weight.
The greatest source of the ‘ugliness’ is the congeners, including the fusel oils. Of course, some of them produce the particular flavor of particular favorite wee drams.
Just as we have Neurosine as a deprecated indication of the medical value of C. sativa, we have a book published in the late '40s on the health and medical benefits of beverage alcohol. It is probably far from the inevitable wicked evil so many busybodies over the years have made it out to be, although if you truly want a headache work your way through the thirty-odd specific and often contradictory effects alcohol has on the human body…
Meanwhile – I have never entirely understood why fundamentalist Christians try to be teetotalers. What the Bible says is essentially in line with STRONG drink being a mocker; moderation is a different thing entirely. Then your believers have to get around what was being served in the upper room the night of Gethsemane … it sure wasn’t Welch’s.
Of course you can reasonably tell if theology has been doctored by a particular sect when you hear some of the frankly remarkable excuses for Christ’s first miracle. Some of them are more than a little reminiscent of Clinton’s ‘I never inhaled’…
Quoting Overmod: " What the Bible says is essentially in line with STRONG drink being a mocker;…"
Some wine may seem strong to some, but Proverbs, chapter 20, verse 1, says, “Wine is a mocker; strong drink is raging (or a brawler), and whoever is led astray by it is not wise.”
Did you ever read My Talks with Dean Spanley by Lord Dunsany? Under the influence of Tokay wine, the good dean would recount tales of his life as a dog.
Yes, we should be moderate in our use of ethanol in all of the carriers.
BaltACD pretty much has it covered. IN our area, ethanol cars going south are headed to 3 ethanol plants empty; going north they are full. Grain cars going south are empties going to elevator loadouts; going north they are full headed for Duluth or the west coast ports.
I’m not observant enough to look at springs on a rail car and tell if they are compressed or not. I’d have to have an empty and a load next to each other to compare. I can very easily tell loads from empties by the sound the cars make as they pass by. The creaks and groans are apparent but the pitch of the hum of wheels on rails is the giveaway to me.
As I get older, my hearing is not what it used to be. For some reason my hearing is more and more becoming the opposite of a dog’s hearing. Dogs can hear high pitches that humans can&#
Murphy S.
Take from me; Your hearing will be more and more of a problem[sigh]… It will get better; when your wife tells you to go get hearing aids- or she orders you a set from Amazon ! As your hearing gets better, it will; be a very high pitched sound relaying the above information… [:-,]
You can tell when looking at the side of the wheels/bogey/truck (whatever you want to call it) On top of the springs is a box girder that is the cross member from one side of the truck to the other. The car is setting on that member, free to pivot on it at the center. The ends of that member are setting on the springs that are setting on the lower portion of the side frame. The wheels are on the axle that the side frame is resting on.
The weight bearing path, from the rail to the car is, wheels, axle, side frame, springs, cross member, car pivot point.
But back to that girder/cross member. It is usually divided into two sections across its length by a vertical web. So, from the end, what you see is two rectangles next to each other, sharing one side in the center (that web). That cross member is free to move up and down inside the side frame in the area occupied by the springs and the cross member (or maybe the side frame is free to move vertically around the cross member, depending on how you want to consider it). The area below the cross member is filled by the springs, but above the cross member is free space that is about the same size and shape as the end of the cross member.
Compare the height of the cross member to the space above it.
When the car is empty that space will be slightly smaller (in height) than the height of the cross member and when the car is fully loaded that space will be slightly taller than the cross member (the springs being compressed). Careful compareson of the height of those two rectangular spaces will give you some idea of whether the car is full or empty.
It can be hard to tell on some cars if it was designed to carry a heavy product, (thus it has stronger or more&nb
They say most people start to experience hearing loss in the frequency range of their spouse’s voice.
Yes, the Ethanol industry is in trouble. With prices of fuel this low, sales of ethanol right now are at or below the cost of production. The small refinery waivers have also reduced demand. Ethanol could compete with gas now if the price of corn was low, but that would be a serious blow to Agriculture.
The correct name for the “box girder” is truck bolster.
More specifically, three-piece-truck bolster (other designs of truck have very different construction, and there are a number of highly-interesting patents for detail design of three-piece truck bolsters of alternative construction).
I think he was trying to explain to someone who said he was a ‘layman’ in engineering (and, as I recall, also said that he had trouble distinguishing loaded spring depression range from unloaded) what to look for in the side view of a three-piece truck. I admit that I’d start by describing what the bolster does, and then go on to describe what it usually looks like and how its end appears, but I’m more of a tech fiend than the person who was asking.
Yeah, I knew it had a proper name and would have used it and called it a box girder just as a description, but my brain had left the room when I started writing and I could not remember the name… even box girder is probably not a good descrition except to say that when viewed from the end you see a box shape.
“Box girder” is a reasonable characterization of the kind of welded-bolster construction being described, including the stiffening web in the middle. There’s a wealth of patents for various kinds of bolster design, including those for ‘high-speed’ three-piece trucks (a fascinating evolution in and of itself!) and various methods of precluding truck skew at the bolster as wear progresses…
I found it fascinating that in the early Seventies a comparatively large range of ‘interchange’ trucks was found perfectly suitable for peak operating speed of 90mph, without the anti-lozenging features I thought would surely be necessary for safety in that range. Don’t think that because a three-piece truck is simple, it isn’t extremely capable when its detail design has been done right.