Since most grain loading is done outside out in well ventilated areas I wouldn’t think that the concentration would be there for combustion. Also the railcars are not as insulated from the ground as a truck on rubber tires. Good point though and I wonder if the high output (like being discussed) facilities worry about that and have safe-guarded angainst it.
I live in Hamlet, IN. We have a rather large Co-Op grain facility here. C.F.&E. came in Thursday morning with a 100 car train at 8:30 in the morning. Byi 4:00 in the afternoon the elevator informed them the train was loaded and ready to go. This is a normal operation for them.
There are quite a few new grain shuttle loaders in northern Illinois. The BNSF has them just east of Mendota (the railroad calls it Greenwood), then further west on the Mendota Sub at Galva. There are at least two on the ex-Santa Fe Chili Sub also. These all feature a fairly large footprint with a track loop that passes beneath the loading silo. Just like was said, they do store some grain onsite, but mainly they load as needed from local elevators.
The BNSF drops off the train and they usually have a retired engineer off a class-one come in and run the train through the loading loop. Turn around time is 12-15 hours in most cases.
The Union Pacific also has a shuttle loader down at Sterling, IL but it is not a loop. It is just a couple of parallel tracks alongside the UP mainline. The same deal though; UP drops it off and the crew of six to eight guys has 12 hours or so to load it. At Sterling they have their own EMD SW1200 to move the cuts of cars around. I stop in a few years ago to take pictures as they were loading corn for one of the big cattle feed lots in Texas. It takes four semi boxes of grain to fill one grain hopper, so that’s 400 or so semis to make one unit train. There is a guy that shows up from the US Dept of Agriculture to check the moisture and quaility of the grain as it is loaded. It was a neat operation.
Lance
The BNSF ad on PBS shows about a 3 second clip on flood loading a grain car.
The new elevator described by Murphy is the result of a ongoing gain in crop yield due to genetics. For example according the extension service of Iowa State University, the average corn yield for the 12 northwest Iowa counties has gone from 143 bu/acre in 2001 to 195 bu/acre in 2009. Despite diversion of a considerable portion of the crop to locally produced ethanol, that has placed a strain on storage and transportation facilities.
In my area, the largest elevator built 3 concrete pads, each about the size of a football field. Beginning in late October they begin to fill and by Christmas you have 3 mountains of corn, each about 30 feet high. Over the winter, that gradually disappears, mostly on the BNSF.
Wind River COOP @ Garden City, KS exports more grain than any US loading terminal. This is a fairly new facility opening in 1997. They have a three trk yard which can hold a 115 car shuttle. A former NP and Garden City Western GP9, still lettered for the GCW but now in RCO mode, will pull a trk out and load it from head end to rear end. The agreement that Wind River has w/ BNSF is once a shuttle arrives at the elevator, it has 15 hours to load regardless which time of day or night the empty unit train shows up.
All the elevators seem to be ready to start loading as soon as the road power is out of the way. I remember spotting an empty grain train at Ralston, IA. At the time we had to spot the train onto 5 or 6 tracks, now they like most other facilities have a siding where we just leave the train. It was 3 AM and the elevator’s loadout crew was waiting to go to work as soon as we left.
Jeff
The Pinal Feeding Co. grain shuttle terminal near Maricopa, AZ suffered just such an explosion in 2008. Here’s an excerpt from the Maricopa 360 website article:
Three workers were treated by Maricopa Paramedics on scene and then flown to Maricopa County Medical Center with first and second degree burns to their face and hands as a result of the powerful dust explosion.
Fire investigators have determined the origin of the initial explosion was in one of the four vertical grain elevator legs with a secondary explosion reportedly caused by the first and subsequent fire ball to the subterranean grain elevator network. The explosion could be felt and heard throughout the City of Maricopa. The tremendous force of the explosion was such that it sheared six 7/8 inch bolts to a truck scale lifting a semi loaded with grain weighing approximately 80,000 pounds.
There are several pictures of the facility on the Sunset Route Tracking Updates thread.
John Timm
Virtually ANY commodity that creates a amount of ‘dust’ in it’s handling is susceptible to spontaneous explosions of a number of safety precautions are not taken and religiously adhered to. Additionally the equipment handling these commodities has to be up to operational snuff…no bad bearings or other parts capable of generating a heat source in the handling. There have been explosions at virtually every type facility that handles commodities that create a high dust level…even in commodities that are not normally considered explosive when considered by themselves.
[quote user=“desertdog”]
switch7frg:
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
The Pinal Feeding Co. grain shuttle terminal near Maricopa, AZ suffered just such an explosion in 2008. Here’s an excerpt from the Maricopa 360 website article:
Three workers were treated by Maricopa Paramedics on scene and then flown to Maricopa County Medical Center with first and second degree burns to their face and hands as a result of the powerful dust explosion.
Fire investigators have determined the origin of the initial explosion was in one of the four vertical grain elevator legs with a secondary explosion reportedly caused by the first and subsequent fire ball to the subterranean grain elevator network. The explosion could be felt and heard throughout the City of Maricopa. The tremendous force of the explosion was such that it sheared six 7/