Found a string of them parked on a siding on NS’ A&O line. My question to you all is. Why do they have GLIX reporting marks? All my research says that GLIX is a reporting mark of Georgia Power. Why would they need a large amount of ballast cars?
They’re probably not for ballast, but limestone, per the captions on most of the photos here:
http://www.rrpicturearchives.net/rsList.aspx?id=GLIX&cid=5
http://www.rrpicturearchives.net/rsList.aspx?aid=H350&id=GLIX
They sure look like ballast hoppers, but if they’re hauling limestone (and you can see the loads in some of the photos), that’s probably not being used for ballast (too soft, degrades too quickly under traffic, etc.).
Instead, the limestone is probably being used in a ‘scrubber’ or ‘fluidized bed’ of some kind to remove air pollutants from the exhaust gasses at the power plant, such as sulphur dioxide, nitrous oxide, etc. (Anyone who’s a chemical or mechanical engineer, etc., and knows more about this, feel free to jump in here and correct or add to this supposition.)
Ironically, this one of GLIX 9064 - which looks like a traditional coal hopper - is captioned as being for a ballast hopper: http://www.rrpicturearchives.net/rsPicture.aspx?id=641359
- Paul North.
hey that’s my photo! Back when I had no clue how to photograph trains [(-D]
Actually I think that was more or less a Ballast hopper too, just in a dark black scheme rather then a light gray.
Speakin’ of the devil I’ve gotten some photographs of both kinds of Hoppers in the past week or so.
http://davidellias.rrpicturearchives.net/showPicture.aspx?id=3804643
http://davidellias.rrpicturearchives.net/showPicture.aspx?id=3794392
I’m guessing the Black ones are used on CSX and the grey ones are for NS Service.
Where is the A&O Sub?
All of those cars above have standard bottom dumping hopper outlets.
None of them have ballast outlets which can dump material to the sides of the rails instead in between underneath the train.