Our local paper has a news story about a $25 million grain loading eleveator to be built about 20 miles from my house, near the little burg of Lyons, S.D. I assume this is what’s called a “flood elevator” (?) The news story states that the “shuttle terminals” can load 110 to 120 cars in 10 to 15 hours. Really? That works out to between 5.45 to 7.5 minutes per car.
Are grain hoppers filled that fast? Is the trrain kept in constant motion for 10-15 hours? Who operates the locomotive once the road crew gets the train to the station? Does the road crew typically end up laying over the 10-15 hours, then heading back out with the same train?
Murphy you don’t subscribe to TRAINS Magazine? The April 2009 issue covered it all. And no you can’t flood load a grain hopper, but with a well designed facility you can load pretty fast. Normally either the elevator has someone trained and authorized to operate locomotives on their own trackage, or they contract with someone to operate them.
Last time I read the tariff, 15 hours was the time aloted for loading and unloading. If the elevator met that time limit the BNSF would knock a $100/car off the charges. That would be $11,000+ per train. Same thing at destination. Do it in 15 hours or less and another $100/car comes off the charges.
The grain cars and locomotives are transportation equipment. They don’t earn any money sitting still. Keep 'em moving and everyone can come out ahead.
Around here we have 2 Shuttle Elevators that can load a Complete 110 car train in less than 15 hours from the time they get it. First time around they have a team of 2 on top opening the roof hatches and 2 low making sure the bottoms are closed as the train crawls by at 1 mph in pacesetter. Then the Next trip they load it up and close it up tie on the DPU for the rear and call the BNSF to ship out a crew.
The article regarding this project in our local paper indicated the grain is destined for west coast export. However, when I traced the line on satellite pictures, it does not appear a turnout exists at the place in Sioux Falls where this line joins the BNSF line running northeast toward Wilmar Minnesota. If that is ground truth, is there a wye south of there that could be used to reverse the direction (I didn’t see one)?
They operate unit grain trains out of Madison, which is at the end of the line. Typically, the unit train is brought down to Sioux Falls, broken into half a dozen segments, and poked into every open siding. The next day, it’s reassembled, with the engines on the north end, and heads out to Wilmar. This part is usually done at night. In the summer, with the windows open, you can hear lots of activity downtown as they reassemble the train.
That’s hardly consistent with the expected 10- to 15-hour loading times and substantial financial incentives to meet them, etc. So I’d expect to see either a connection revamping of some kind - such as to add a couple turnouts and a track so the train can go directly in the proper direction - or perhaps to run it as a “push-pull” with DPU-capable units on both ends, so reversing direction becomes just a matter of a few minutes for the crew to change ends. Stay tuned on that in the coming months . . . Do you think the new elevator will be ‘on-line’ in time for the 2011 harvest ?
Took less than 6 months from Ground breaking til first train here in IL for both Elevators and one was a Brand new place. The other was an expansion of the local elevator to allow it to load shuttle trains.
Good thought, except the track layout, the city layout, the compass directions,future downtown development, a federal grant , the big hill and the bridge over the waterfalls cause a whole bunch of contibuting issues to the track situation downtown that haven’t been fixed in the last 100 years.[:-,]
Hurry up and load the train in 10-15 hours, so we can haul it 20 miles down the line and have a sit for a day or two. [(-D]
This probably has already been covered, but here is my experience with a “shuttle” elevator.
A few years ago I stopped at such a facility just east of Mendota, Il. where a BNSF unit train was parked on a loop track. A manager of the elevator took a couple of minutes and explained it to me.
The elevator does not store the grain, except for very short periods of time, in anticipation of a loadout.
Trucks, in an almost nonstop fashion, bring the grain from local elevators, where it is unloaded and then transloaded into the train. BNSF would deliver the empties and leave the locomotives attached. The elevator was responsible for the labor to move the train for loading. The manager indicated they hired local farmers, trained them on the operation of locomotive and the train would be loaded within a set period of time.
The shuttle elevator I was at is nothing more than an efficient funnel. It is difficult to believe that the capex for such an operation would be recooped, but obviously it is.
Thanks, Ed - I hadn’t even seen or heard about that aspect before, but I can see the benefits of it. So unlike the PRB coal mines - which like to brag about how many trainloads of coal they can store in their silos - this one tries to minimize the amount and time in storage. If they’re skillful, it would be only a fraction of a trainload - at an extreme, not more than somewhere between 1 truckload and 1 hopper carload, so as to be able to maintain the ‘flow’ while one or the other is moving off and the next one is being positioned. That also has the advantage of not having to build and pay for a lot of unnecessary storage, they don’t have to finance the inventory, either - nor are they subject to the risk of fluctuations in the commodity prices of the grain.
In view of the above, maybe not as much CapEx as might be expected. Sure, a strip of land in the right shape, the track on it, the connections to the mainline, and a scale, office, and the loading machinery - but hopefully not a huge volume of storage silos. Probably those already exist and have been fully paid off as ‘legacy’ facilities elsewhere in the community, from ‘back in the day’ when the farmers might have to hold onto a year’s worth of harvest to get a good price, and the railroad service was a lot less frequent or fast. If so, then why replicate that storage capacity at today’s higher prices ?
With grain there is obviously a mismatch between the timing of production and consumption. With a harvest season of maybe 8 weeks and consumtion steady throughout a year, 10 months or more of the annual grain production has to be stored somewhere. In fact, over time storage has moved back up the transportation stream with both the merchants in the farming areas and the farms steadily increasing storage capacity.
A number of things have caused the shift, but perhaps the most important is the use of unit train service for the movement of frain. A 110 car train hauls almost 400,000 bushels of corn. If not in storage right at the loadout, the grain has to be stored fairly close. I doubt that a merchant is going to count on a sufficient movement direct from the field to the loadout to supply a train.
The change storage from concrete to steel construction may be a big factor, as I suspect that the cost per bushel for steel for comparable size bins is lower. Whereas concrete is fixed and can become a stranded asset, steel bins can be dismantled and sold in an active used market.
The “Just in Time” concept works for grain processers/end users as well as any other business dealing with goods and it is in their interest push storage/inventory carrying costs up stream.
The growth in farm size and yields impact the economics of farm storage. In the 1950’s, corn yields were under a hundred bushels per acre. Now yields run over 200 bushels. I suspect that farm sizes have at least double in the intervening years. This plays out in cost per bushel for the storage capex as I have seen indications that the cost for “large” farm storage facilities can run a third of the cost for small units.
I have not had the oppurtunity to visit any grain unit train loading operations, but with a brief on line search found a central Wisconsin operation with a loadout for a single car spot rated at 1
All good info and points, Jay - thanks for sharing. Next time Trains does an article on unit grain trains you ought to write a ‘sidebar’ on these aspects of it. [tup]
One portion of your post puzzles me a little bit, though:
Is there an extra “0” in there or something ? But even at 1,000 TPH, a single facility at that rate could load 15,000 tons in 15 hours, which is a little over the 12,100 tons that 110 cars at 110 tons each would carry, unless the 2 additional setups are needed to cover the ‘downtime’ while the cars are being moved ahead ?
I’ll admit to being a little sardonic about the PRB coal mines storage capacity - but it’s an interesting contrast to see how the agricultural people found a way to save/ avoid some CapEx cost duplication.
[:-^] While reading this thread , I wondered if the loading and unloading systems are grounded from static electricity? Grain dust is highly combustible. Fuel trucks have a ground cable from the truck clipped to the underground tank lip. ~~ Just curious. Jim