Yesterday, in the BNSF yard in Sioux Falls, S.D. there was a loaded coil car. I know it was, as I’ve seen photos of these[;)], but never a real, live one until now. I know it’s a stray, because there’s no real destination in S.D. for coil cars.
Where do coil cars typically originate, and where do they ship to? And, if a lost one follows me home, can I keep it?
I wouldn’t take it. It’s too easy to follow it’s tracks. [:D]
Only if it has a cute little puppy or a big friendly dog that likes to play in it. [:)]
Murphy - it probably wandered out of our yards - we have a lot of them go through here - some without lids but a lot of them with their lids! You aren’t that far away and maybe it took a small vacation up north.
If you can get it to follow you home, let me how cuz I am still trying to get a locomotive to follow me home!
Mookie
If it does ‘follow you’ home,and you try to teach it some tricks;
DON’T try to teach it to stand up and shake,or roll over!!! [(-D][(-D]
You mean behave like an ALCo… All the one’s I ever rode in seemed like they were trying to do that.
Did the stray you saw leave little smelly piles of coiled steel in it’s tracks like most strays do (albiet with other smelly things)?
Murphy,
Most likely a bad order set out from a through train.
Look to see if there is a bright orange or green BO tag on it somewhere.
It will be about the size of a half sheet of standard printer paper.
The car doesn’t “have” to have one on it if it is a bad order, but it usually does.
Origin can be almost anywhere, Australia, Japan, Korea ,China, or made here in the US.
Coil sheet steel goes to stamping mills and fabrication plants…used for almost anything that you can stamp into a shape, from car bodies to shelf brackets.
Coiled wire is usually going to a plant that will re melt it and pour shapes, or, depending on the type of steel, make nails or fasteners, even things like screwdrivers.
I have heard it refered to as feed stock wire, at least down here the fab plants call it that.
The Stanley Corp turns out something like 1 million screwdrivers in various styles each year…
Coiled wire is usually shipped in mill gondolas, coiled sheet steel also, but the coil car is the preferred way for coiled sheet steel.
Covered steel coils have a high carbon content, for a specific use, the covers keep the rain off so it doesn’t rust…un covered means the steel is going some place for re processing, and or it doesn’t matter if the elements get to it.
I have even seen coiled sheets of TreadBright, the patterned steel used for walkways and such loaded in coil cars.
NS has a fleet of specialty cars with custom covers to keep the coils almost air tight…BN has a pretty big fleet of regular coil cars, and SP had a bunch also.
Ed
i see them in Altoona a lot. i think they like the peacefulness there. i want a WC SD45 to follow me home. or an SD60. so i could paint it in CNW colors and keep it! thing is i hear those beasts eat a LOT and that they have more power than the typical locomotive
though if an AC4400CW followed me home, i’d freak out. GEs are wild and often tempermental. man i love metaphors
Now there’s a mystery in itself. We’re not really on the way from anywhere, to anywhere. Unless the coil car was headed to, or from a grain elevator,ethanol plant, or rock quarry, it was quite a ways off-course[:)]
Not that I have ever done it…but sometimes the switch crew makes a mistake and throws the car to the wrong track, and it ends up…
If the train it was on was a hot shot, they may not have bothered to cut it out till it got there…
Or the AEI tag is missing, and it is a “lost” car…get the reporting marks and car number(BNSF 123456) and post it, maybe one of the dispatchers here could look it up.
I would see an occasional one show up around here, and thought the same thing about there not being a destination nearby for one, until a trip out of town took my through the neighboring county where I found where they were going: a small plant that fabricates the horizontal Propane tanks like you see at houses and farms in rural areas. A small scale industry destination, but a destination nonetheless.
You mean, there’s a remote chance that a switch crew somewhere in Houston could accidently send a chinese steam engine my way?[;)][;)] sweet!!![:p]
They are ship to OHIO there is a steel mill plant that melts down raw steel and then brings them to Buffalo NY.
Murphy:
Come on down to Northwest Indiana, the steel making capital of US and I will show you coil cars.
It is not uncommon to see solid coil car trains, although I am not sure where they are destined.
NS has a daily train from Ft. Wayne to Van Loon, In. which runs like clockwork. Train 323 brings empty coil cars and interchanges with the EJE and then returns with loaded coil cars. This happens 363 days a year, perhaps more. Train size is usually about 30 cars, but sometimes as many as 75 (heavy train).
I will email you a picture of 323.
ed
Since the car disappeared out of the yard, I’m wondering who in our area would use coiled steel. The 3 suspects that I can think of, are a steel bridge builder, a watertower builder, and a railcar repair facility. Would any of them use steel rolled thin, on a coil?
Actually, the car is one I ordered a while back. I had a yen for a giant Slinky.
[(-D] Dave-where have you been hiding that sense of humor? You haven’t taken it out for exercise in a while.[;)]
It could also have been a ‘buffer’ car or ‘reacher’ car - needed to separate either oddly loaded flatcars or toxic cars from other cars or from the engine. Usually they use really old beater gons or flats for this, but if the empty coil car was all they had, that’s what they would go with. What else was in the yard at the time the coil car was there?