Subject says it all. One of my industries will be shipping out limestone and would like to know if anyone knows if the prototype typically shipped this in covered hoppers or if a gon/open hopper was the norm. Thanks guys.
Can’t speak in generalities, but the one specific case I knew well in the 1960s was a mine which shipped high quality crushed, washed limestone in open-top hoppers. the `whitewash’ left a trail along the ties in line with the lower edges of the side-dump doors, a foot wide at the mine, tapering down to a trace about an inch wide where the cars were interchanged to a different route. Where the trains stood still (two passing sidings and the interchange) the drips took on a pattern like the dashed white line that served as a highway centerline back when.
Photos I have seen of rail-served cement plants showed open tops, but I could understand a steel maker wanting to get his blast furnace flux in closed tops, especially if the local air was heavily polluted. Concrete mixing plants aren’t quite as fussy.
Chuck (Modeling Central Japan in September, 1964)
It depends - there are a couple of plants in my general part of the country that ship limestone products in covered hoppers http://www.graymont.com/locations_cricket.shtml . The older quarries shipping limestone to the USS Geneva steel mill varied, shipping in open hoppers or gons.
The taconite hauling railroads serving Duluth-Superior sometimes back haul limestone (either in ore cars or side-dump cars) to the iron range. The limestone comes into the harbor by boat; the taconite plants use in creating taconite pellets.
Limestone in open hoppers or gondolas, lime in covered hoppers, and limes in reefers. [swg]
Wayne
On the D&RGW, many long trains of limestone were always hauled in open, wood sided gondolas. The ore, on average, was mostly cobble size. (between 6x6x6 or 8x8x8)
This limestone was mostly out of the Monarch branch on the narrow gauge.
Richard
I did a TV news story in 1980 or so about a Portland Cement manfucaturing plant that switched from running its thousand-foot-long rotating cylindrical oven on natural gas which was getting more expensive, to coal. The point of the story was that it became less expensive to burn coal, AND that the limestone being baked into cement absorbed the pyproduct particulate matter from the coal burning without hurting the quality of the cement being produced, and without a lot of expensive added pollution control equipment. (There was already pollution control equipment to take the white particulate matter out of the smokestack. Before about 1970-something, the cement plant had a white plume visible for some 50 miles or so, used for navigation by ships at sea!
Hello El Cap,
In the late 1980s and 1990s the Waukesha Lime & Stone quarry near here was shipping out finely powdered limestone to be sprayed onto the walls of underground mines as a sealant. It was generally loaded in Wisconsin Central two-bay covered hoppers similar to the PS-2 type (WC was the railroad serving the quarry). The WC is part of CN now and the quarry is closed, but for many years those cuts of covered hoppers were a regular part of the WC’s Waukesha switch job.
The quarry was included on the N scale WC project railroad featured in Model Railroader in 1997 and 1998. The specific article on modeling the quarry was “Waukesha Lime & Stone; adding heavy industry to our Wisconsin Central,” by Bob Gallegos, Dennis Pehoski, Gary Seymour, and Tim Wickerham in the March 1998 MR, p. 80.
So long,
Andy
Don’t know if covered or not, or what era, but LS was quarried and ground near here, and shipped to S&K steel in Middletown O, as flux. May be able to get a handful or two, if you need some prototype powder for scenic purposes… Steve, at smcnew@mvctc.com