First thing my broker at Merrill Lynch promoted to me was a system for pyrolysis of ground at Superfund sites (it was portable, on several truck and trailer chassis). I got a very good education in how that method works – even if I didn’t wind up investing…
I do think, though, that there are still plenty more places that can stow trash away in sealed landfills than there are places that want to host a large incineration facility…
Of course there was a time when New York’s trash was dumped in the Jersey Meadows. Many acres of land in New Jersey were created by New York trash. I can remember taking the train to New York Penn Station and seeing pieces of New York Penn Station strewn around. Now it has all sunk.
There is a landfill here in South Carolina near Bishopville that is served by the South Carolina Central Railroad. There is a short video of a SCCRR trash train on youtube.I have been told this garbage originated in New Joisey
I’m sure CNW4001 is right. I don’t know how often it runs, but I see that loaded garbage train passing through Pittsburgh most often on Sundays. The containers are blue with reporting marks of “LWT”. Loaded trains headed west to a landfill in Ohio, and the empties returning east. It can get your attention on a hot summer day. About 2 years ago one of them caught a stop signal where we usually sit railfanning. We were really happy when the signal changed.
Well, I can see that’s ONE reason they don’t use cabooses anymore. Can you imagine riding on the tail end of a mile or more of that, uh, “stuff”?
You are probably right. Up until the mid 1990’s the State of New Jersey had a monopoly on our trash and garbage. Then the Supreme Court ruled this was a violation of the interstate commerce clause of the Constitution. Since that time individual counties contract with various companies to dispose of it. The companies are located in several states.
Also, New York City puts its garbage on a barge and sends the barge to the port at Elizabeth, NJ where it is transferred to trains and shipped to different places.
We have to remember that garbage is about money and not morality.
When the Supreme Court ruled that placing restrictions on the movement of garbage was interfering with interstate commerce, even the conservative leaning dissenting justices noted that allowing market forces to dictate where and how garbage was managed would remove environmental considerations from the decision making process. The end result has been the trash trains.
Railroads and garbage have always had a mutually beneficial relationship. The Central Railroad of New Jersey passenger terminal on the Hudson River was built on land created by filling the wetlands with odiferous garbage. Many street railway companies provided ash-hauling services for their host communities.
Kevin
I grew up in New York, so I am going to correct some errors in BNSFwatchers post. First Staten Island land fill was Fresh Kill, not Fresh Kills. Second the old subway cars were stripped of everything except the steel and dumped to make artificial reefs which have attrated fish to live there. Third the flyash was dumped well out on the continental shelf from land, but due to the heavy metals in the flyash that practice was stopped. Even with the new sewage treatment plants I will not fish for swim in the East river. Still contaminated.
Did somebody just mention Amtrak?
Took you 13 years to come up with that?
Thursday afternoons my son and I train watch on the old PRR main line west of Duncannon PA. A very regular visitor, going one way or the other, is the garbage train. Last Thursday it was extra stinky! Yep it still runs!
GS
We have our own version of garbage haulage in this part of New England. An enterprise based in Ayer MA has repurposed old seagoing shipping containers by taking off the tops and replacing them with a fabric cover. They are placed on truck chassis to collect the municipal waste from various points and are gathered here at a former auto unloading facility where they are double stacked to go via the Hoosac Tunnel route. (Full size merchandise containers can only be sinle stacked through the tunnel).
Be interesting to see if they’re cutting the containers down to the Indian ‘dwarf container’ height to get the double-stack clearance.
How much additional clearance is needed when the containers come back double-stacked empty?
The problem I see here is that the extra toxic garbage trains from the Eastern Cities is being shipped to the poor rural areas of Ohio and Indiana. Fostoria Ohio beiing one of those destinations.
And you know it is “extra toxic” how?
Sea cans are not as high as domestic boxes. Double stacked sea cans measure out at 19’ 6" I believe. Domestic double stacks measure out at 20’6".
Double stack sea cans can clear CSX’s Howard Street tunnel, double stack domestic cans can’t.
Shipments of municipal trash from major metropolitan area has been taking place for decades.
Watching trash shipments passing the Dispatching Office at Baltimore when I was working - most were double stacked ‘miniture’ containers - roughly 20 feet long and 6 feet high - double stacked.
They tried to bring garbage into the Anthracite mines in Schuylkill County PA but, the people said NO! They felt that the water was already polluted enough from the mine drainage.