Out walking last night I got to see an empty Dakota & Iowa Railroad train roll by. It was a unit train of empty rock cars heading home from Sioux City iowa to homebase at the quarry in Dell Rapids S.D. Right behind the 4 locomotives were 2 loaded tank cars. I deduced that they were probably hauling diesel fuel for the railroad.
I presume that any good sized shortline railroad would consume enough diesel fuel to warrant shipping it in by rail. That makes sense.
On average, the D&I uses 4-5 old Geeps and SD-40s to haul 2 unit trains of rock about 110 miles out and empties back home every day. Adding in the work trains in the yard to put together trains and such, how much fuel could a railroad of that size go through in month? Any thoughts?
This is VERY rough. May vary a bunch if average grade is ascending. I will assume average flat but actually rolling (undulating) grade.
Your 110 car train will weigh 14,450 tons assuming fully loaded nominal 100 ton cars, 263,000 gross weight on rail. That means your SD 40 is rated at not less than 7,250 tons, which implies maximum grade against the loads of about .5%, a nice line in terms of grade.
I will assume 25 MPH which is about 5 hours travel time. Add 1 hour to load, one to unload and one to run around and switch out bad order cars. Have 5 hours under heavy load, 5 hours light load, and 3 hours basically run 1. Somewhat arbitrarily I will assume 100 GPH per unit heavy load, 50 GPH light load and 25 GPH Run 1. Actual consumption rate as function of throttle is available but since the duty cycle is a guess, I did not bother to look it up.
With SD 40 per unit, we have 5x100, plus 5x50, plus 3x25 or 825 gallons per unit per trip. Two units 1,650 gallons per trip.
With Geeps you have smaller engines but more of them. Horsepower hours will be in same ballpark so assume 4 geeps have same fuel consumption as two SD 40s, another 1,650 gallons per trip, or 3,300 gallons per day.
It would take 7.5 working days to go through a 25,000 gallon tank car, or about 8 for a 28,000 gallon car. If the RR saves 10 cents per gallon that is $330 per day. That will buy about three new wood ties installed per work day.
Much more data is needed to provide a better estimate than Mac has above.
Aside from the distance you’ve provided, most important is about how long those locomotives are running in each throttle position. That in turn depends mainly on the grade(s) and/or the rises and falls of the profile over that distance; curve resistance would also be a minor factor, as is the speed at each location.
I thought buffer cars were only required on units trains of flammable stuff?
It’s certainly possible that the tank cars had something else in them. The only other tank car traffic further up the line would have been maybe fertilizer to either of the small elevators up the line. I just figured diesel fuel because that seemed like the only thing anybody would need in quantity up the line.
Thanks to Mac’s figures above, it looks like they use perhaps 40-50 carloads a year. The fertilizer might be a carload a year to each elevator. Who knows, since there was 2 cars together, maybe that was this year’s shipment?
Diesel fuel is combustible so I believe it does not need buffer cars. If they were carrying diesel fuel they should have been placarded 1202 or 1993.
Besides quantity of fuel used another factor is distance to the nearest pipeline terminal. Both UP and BNSF probably use more fuel around here than D&I but refuel their locomotives from trucks since the yards are close to a pipeline terminal.
That would be my guess. Take a look at satellite photographs of the terminal. If there are no tank car loading facilities, it is probably almost guaranteed they get fuel by truck but there are almost always exceptions.
1202 is gasoline that has been mixed with water normally you get that from old storage tanks that are being removed from an abandoned gas station when they do tank removals and have to suction out any gas in the tank. 1187 is denatured alchohal or how they ship ethanoal long distances in a tank car or trailer. 1993 is for all grades of fuel oil. 1203 is for gasoline of all types. Oh yeah however the one you never want to go bang around you is a 1075 LPG tank car. However the ones marked poison gas would be the ones that do scare me the most and we do handle crap like that on a regular basis.
Where in God’s name do you get this? It certainly wasn’t the Orange Book.
1202 has been a ‘fuel oil’ code since forever (note that this can apply to even bottom grades of fuel oil, from #1 or #2 diesel right to #6 residual). It has nothing whatsoever to do with gasoline (1203), admixed or not.
1187 is deprecated in my version of the book. Denatured (modern) alcohol would be 1__9__87, “alcohol not otherwise specified” and it has nothing to do with “ethanol” being shipped over any particular distance; in fact, it would likely not be ethanol at all (which is 1170) but isopropyl (rubbing) alcohol. Denaturing refers to adding a chemical such as denatonium benzoate that makes the substance extremely unpalatable. (Note that if methanol were being added as the denaturant, as was common for ethyl alcohol during Prohibition, the placard would have to be 1986, as the result would be a toxic methemoglobinuria hazard.)
I am beginning to think that the use of 1993 for “fuel oil” (it is nominally a catchall for flammable liquid, just as 1992 is for toxic flammable liquid) is related to whether it is flammable vs. combustible. Some light Bakken crude oil in unit trains might have a flash point in the flammable range (100F or below) and not combustible like the usual diesel/gas oil (100-200F) and therefore IDing it as a fuel stock with lower-than-normal-fuel-oil flashpoint might explain some of the ‘double coding’.
I can’t say that I’ve ever encountered 1202 on the road or on rails. Searching for “fuel oil” in the ERG (2016 edition) on my phone gives 1993 and 1202 as possible ID’s, but I suspect 1993 is generally used.
1203 is usually used for gasoline, and it’s also listed as gasohol, motor spirit, and petrol in the ERG.
You’ll often see 1993 used for local fuel delivery trucks, where they might be carrying fuel oil, kerosene, and maybe even gasoline in the various compartments. It’s kind of a catch-all ID.
1187 doesn’t come up on my phone. The hard copy of the ERG (also 2016) is out in the truck, so I’ll just go with what the phone tells me.
IIRC, ethanol by rail is usually placarded as 1987. Seems like I’ve heard that it is denatured using gasoline. In those quantities, it’s going to get mixed with gasoline anyhow, so that’s perfect.