UP derailed a train about an hour east of me in Sibley, Iowa on Sunday. The news said that a car full of liquid asphalt had caught fire, causing some evacuations. It’s reported that they firemen were letting all the liquid asphalt burn itself out. That was causing a huge plume of black smoke. Is liquid asphalt by train really a thing?
Side note: a goofball I work with heard about it over lunch on Monday. He went outside expecting to see a big plume of smoke in the eastern sky, 60 miles away. He just wouldn’t accept the concept of curvature of the earth.
Absolutely. There’s a large facility near Cortland, NY that’s served by the Susquehanna. Much of the asphalt used in central NY probably comes through there. It’s here: N 42 35’ 29" W 76 9’ 9"
Liquid asphalt is about the consistency of tar, thicker than heavy fuel oil. Fairly difficult to ignite compared to lighter fuel oils, but obviously not impossible.
In Canada it is not placarded as a dangerous good.
There is a tank farm just across the track (the one Amtrak 27/28 uses) from the Amtrak station in Vancouver, WA. Whenever I have visited the station, about half of the time there is a tank car on the stub track with a steam hose attached and hissing away to get the asphalt out of the car.
I’ve never tried, but I suspect not at room temperature.
Lots of tank cars have steam coils to heat and thin the product before attempting to unload it. Glue, sulphur and corn syrup also come to mind, and I’m sure there are many, many more.
I don’t want to sound like euclid here, splitting hairs and dissecting semantics,[:P] but… if you have to heat it up a bit to get it to flow out of the car, it’s not liquid asphalt. It’s just asphalt.
"Just asphalt’ usually refers to the paving material, with the gravel aggregate added, used to roll ‘blacktop’ paving. It’s the liquid-when-hot binder that properly has the “asphalt” name (heavy bottoms, etc.) but it makes sense to use the word ‘liquid’ to indicate it’s the petroleum product alone.
If you are a little sleepy this morning here is how the pitch behaves when not steam-heated, shown in a way that speeds it (and you) up:
Tank cars for hot asphalt service are insulated fairly well and come equipped with steam coils. From the time the asphalt is loaded at the refinery at approx. 270-400F you’re looking at about a heat loss of 15-20 degrees in transit. If the temp is lower than 270F in the tank car steam can be hooked up to reduce the viscosity for easier pumping.
At the risk of splitting hairs… even if the asphalt got so stiff that you could not get it to flow, its physical state would still be a liquid. Perhaps the qualifier “liquid” is added to distinguish the binder, from the mixture of liquid asphalt and aggregrate to form “asphalt”, as a type of road.
During the year I spent on a South Pacific island that was used as a military base during WWII, I learned that the roads on the atoll were paved with bunker oil, which has to be heated to be useful as fuel.
True, that. I’ve seen the header from fires at a significant distance - 40+ miles.
OTOH, it doesn’t take much wind to lay the smoke down - I’ve gone to fires that one would think would have been visible from a good distance where you had to almost be on the scene to see the smoke.