And I have been several hundred miles from wild fires and smelled the smoke and seen the haze of the smoke. Then the wind changes direction and it all goes away.
A few years ago, the smoke from wildfires in northern Quebec was carried by the wind into northern and central New York. Made for a weird looking sky, and there were a few “smoke in the area” calls in our county.
We’ve had that from Canadian fires 800-1000 miles upwind as well.
I have to disagree with you on this one, in part.
Some grades are indeed placarded with HOT 3257 placards. We have many asphalt loads here that are dangerous goods with the UN 3257 on the waybill.
There are also tank cars that apparently use electricity to heat the commodity. One end of the car has about five or six burners on it, warming up the commodity, and connected to a large box somewhere on the carbody (often above the tank). I’m not sure that this is always for asphalt, or how specialized the commodity is, but if you see one you won’t forget it. Koppers Company used to have a lot of them. It isn’t easy to find pictures that show this to advantage, but RailroadPictureArchives has a shot of TILX 220310 that might be a little hlpful.
Yeah you’re right, I had forgotten about those. Guess I was just thinking of the non-placarded stuff we more commonly switch around here.
Some grades of heavy fuel oil are not placarded as dangerous either. Only the “HOT” placard (which might be painted on) and a ‘environmentally sensitive’ note on the journal, but you can still put it next to a locomotive or a load prone to shift.
It’s always seemed strange to me that any oil product would not be labelled as a dangerous good.
Turns out that the 3257 number only marks any liquid that is shipped above 100°C, 3256 and 3258 are for loads above 60°C and 240°C respectively. So the stuff I see must not be heated nearly as much, perhaps that means it is thinner (and likely more flammable) than the placarded stuff!
I wonder how long it stays hot for after being loaded in the tank car?
Mix in aggregate with hot asphalt and you can pave roads with the resulting compound. Under the proper sustained situation the roadway paved with asphalt & aggregate CAN catch on fire.
For those who many not have looked up UN 3257:
ELEVATED TEMPERATURE LIQUID, N.O.S., at or above 100 °C and below its flash-point (including molten metals, molten salts, etc.), filled at a temperature not higher than 190 °C.
N.O.S. means not otherwise specified. The guide in the Emergency Response Guide is 171, which is pretty plain vanilla.
I took a cruise on the Delta Queen and before we arrived in Cincinnati, it stopped near North Bend Ohio (near the mouth of the Miami River) to refuel with Bunker C oil for the boilers. The oil was delivered by hoses that were steam heated. Didn’t some locomotives use thick oil that required heating to flow?
Tender oil tanks normally contain steam pipes. They are not always needed, if you are burning a lighter grade like diesel or used motor oil in warm weather the engine may fire just fine without the fuel being preheated, the results of course will vary depending on the engine, fuel grade and ambient temperature.
Heavy fuel oil can solidify in cold weather. The magazine had a story a few years ago about lighting up a cold engine on a Rayonier logging railway during winter in the Pacific northwest, it seemed to be quite the task.
UP’s GTEL Turbines used insulated and heated tanks and tenders to burn Bunker C
Woe to the Diesel truck driver that doesn’t have “winter grade” fuel oil in his tanks when the temperatures dip here in the north country.
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Well, he can always use anti-gelling additives in his #2 if “caught by surprise” – the catch being that he has to put it in quickly enough, or early enough, that the treated fuel gets all the way through to the injectors in time.
I have sometimes wondered why OTR trucks weren’t made with tracer heating for the fuel and injector lines to allow year-round use of #2, as the heat content and some other characteristics of ‘winter’ #1 are inferior.
(I found out that just heating the HFCM ain’t enough to stop the stoppage… [D)])
I have a couple of CB&Q wheel reports from June and July 1966 that show lots of UTLX tank cars loaded with asphalt headed to Asphalt Products Co. in Stevens Point, Wi and WAUCOUHIGH in Ogdensburg, WI (assume this to be Waupaca County Highway department). So asphalt has been being shipped by rail for a long time. The cars b eing used were mostly older UTLX X-4 tank cars with steam heating lines.
Glass is not a liquid, nor do window pains sag in less than billions of years, at least according to Scientific American and other reputedly reliable sources. Those thicker bottoms on window panes were the way they were made.
Coincidence…I’m planning to modify a tank car kit to resemble The Barrett Co.'s car of early 20th century that carried the company’s coal tar-based goo (“Tarvia”) that was used for road surfacing. Couldn’t figure how to paste a photo here, but anyone can Google the company and find photos of the cars it used.
Here’s why you do not heat the fuel up Overmod. The hotter the fuel is in the tanks the less power you get from your charge of fuel. My boss did a study and for every 10 degrees of fuel temp we lost .5% of that trucks MPG. So say a truck could get 9 MPG on a tank of fuel that was at 60 degrees at 90 degrees it was getting 8.86 MPG on that same tank of fuel. The same thing goes for the air charge on a diesel engine. So now you know why we strive to keep the air coming into the engine as cool as possible along with the fuel going into those injectors coming out of the tank.
The biggest difference between #1 and #2 diesel is this #1 has most of the waxes removed from it so it will flow at a lower temp. When diesel fuel gels up all that is happening is that the wax that is suspended in it normally thickens up and
In the interests of correctness – yes, this is right; glass is an amorphous solid but below its glass transition temperature the bonds are ‘self-correcting’ against gravity. Post has been corrected, and yes, I did know better.
On the other hand I’ve seen too many older flat windowpanes that have visibly (albeit very slightly) slumped to believe they were all just made that way. My suspicion is that this might be related to their being thin glass oriented vertically in areas subject to solar radiation, with a large number of small changes in bonding all accumulating over long time, analogous in a way to how signal can be recovered from noise in NMR. It is certainly not because they very slowly flowed like pitch over the years.
Incidentally, I was not suggesting that the tracer lines actually heat the fuel; only that they maintain the liquid inside above waxing/gelling temperature. Under some circumstances you might want to apply ‘higher heat’ for a short time – for example if surprised by a cold snap while the heat monitoring was turned off – but you would cut back to ‘least effective heat’ ASAP, probably thermostatically.
The catch is that you can’t monitor just temperature at the injection pump to determine where waxing might be a concern.
Fuel in the tanks is another matter that I didn’t address. I have never liked the idea of putting coils of any kind inside the tank, any more than I like putting them in the engine-oil sump or in the cooling-water jackets through freeze plugs or the like. In principle the same approach as the external-patch engine “block heater” I had on the PowerCerebrovascularAccident ou
Since typical window glass is opaque to some UV, it wouldn’t be an incredible stretch to have some of the bonds being messed with and causing deformation. OTOH, the lack of a regular crystal structure in glass prevents the formation of dislocations that permit plastic deformation in metals.
The improvement in signal to noise ratio from averaging in NMR (and NQR, radar and some other areas) comes from the signal adding coherently (proportional to the number of averages) while the noise does a random walk and increases with the square root of the noise. The flip side is that the noise can improve resolution as you see signals with amplitudes smaller than the least significant bit of the digitizer.