Paging Carl, or other rolling stock gurus…
When I was in Cheyenne waiting for 844 to head back to Denver I went out and did some railfanning. I caught this train going by. I noticed something interesting on the hoppers…they all had a set of belly plows on them (and the plows were designated “Plow A” & “Plow B” as you can see in the picture). I’ve tried to pull out some shadow detail in the RAW conversion to show the plows a little better, too.
So what is the deal with these?
Thanks in advance!
For some reason, the picture isn’t coming up for me, but I’ll take a stab at it anyway. Were these hoppers green, and numbered in the UP 921000 series?
They’re part of an order for 150 new ballast cars, being built by Kasgro (the heavy-duty flat car folks). The solar panels on the car’s end are for opening the ballast gates by radio control. These plows perform the obvious duty–keeping the ballast off the rails so the wheels can stay on them.
I haven’t seen these cars from any angle lower than the top chord, so I haven’t looked to confirm, but I think the plows are capable of being raised and lowered, possibly with their controls powered by the same solar panels.
Edit: I got the picture, finally. Looks like a more-or-less ordinary hopper, but with a name like Herzog on the label, you can just about bet that it’s for ballast. Same reason applies.
Sweet Carl…thanks for the info. Now I want to find some of those solar powered cars! They sound really interesting!
Herzog has some pretty cool cars around here… all dumping GPS controlled. They are known as the “star wars” trains.
Chris
Go to the Herzog web site.There is some info on there site.
They have a few sets of these.They have a fleet close to 3000 cars.
Here’s some photos I took a couple of weeks ago in New Castle, PA. This is where these hoppers were built. There were about 12 to 15 of them.
Tom
