For cargo like coal that will absorb water and get heavier when wet, do the shippers/loaders load the car light to allow for the increase in weight if the cars get caught in a storm?
NO!
For a long train (150+ cars, I don’t know if that’s considered a long coal train), could this change in weight cause a problem with getting the train slowed down in an emergency? Or would the possible change in the overall weight of the train be factored when it was assembled?
Remember - Railroad weights are measured in 100 pound increments.
In today’s world, coal is weighed at the time the Shipper loads the car. Shipper’s Certified Weights. In many cases, coal is loaded wet from a designated wash plant, to minimize the dust and ‘fines’ in the load. Shippers in some locations are required to spray a specific ‘topping’ on the load to minimize the ‘coal dust’ that can be blown off the cars during transit.
Consignees are paying for the product that the Shipper is selling. Incidental weather encountered during the trip, doesn’t change the amount of the product, it may change the weight of the car carrying to product on rail, BUT it doesn’t change the amount of the product.
The tonnage ratings carriers place upon different classes of locomotives when traversing the various ruling grades that trains may encounter are not truly exact measures. Tonnage ratings are subject to variations in train length upon which the tonnage is distributed.
A territory I worked, a 10K ton ore train would stall on a particular grade where a 10K ton merchandise train would have no troubles at all. The 10K ton ore train was less than 5K feet long; the merchandise train was 10K feet long. The grade had a 10 MPH PERMANENT slow order at its bottom and was joined by similar grade degree and length on the ‘other’ side. The
If a product is in a gondola it doesn’t matter whether or not rain is absorbed, the rain that falls in the car is going to stay in the car.
Water weighs 62#/ cu ft. A 40’ by 10’ gondola with 12" or rain would weigh an extra 24,800#.
You are presuming that gons will hold water - in my experience sending gons to Bethlehem Steel at Sparrows Point by the hundreds each week - very few will hold water - many were rejected because they wouldn’t even hold steel beams or steel plates.
Which is why, as with Dumpsters, you frequently find small drain holes drilled or cut just above the floor.
A side effect is that these can form fairly effective ‘rocket stove’ intakes for fires in flammable contents…
I don’t know that coal (and coke), taconite, ballast, and similar materials are going to be greatly affected by water, as such.
Surface tension may hold some water within the load (which is why unloading facilities often have heaters), but most of the water will just run through.
Grains are generally not going to be allowed to get wet - not good for the product. Plastic pellets aren’t going to be absorbent, but are likely to blow out of the car if exposed, which is why they also go in covered hoppers.
The biggest problem, IMHO, would be sand and gravel. They aren’t absorbent, as such, but will still hold water due to surface tension, etc. One doesn’t often see them on long hauls, though.
Yes, they can be greatly effected! We had a coal train one day after a very very hard rain and the water was actually shoshing out of the tops of some cars that could be seen from the head end. We couldn’t get that train three miles out of Roanoke, Va. heading north!
Need some of Balt’s leaky gons…
I was thinking in terms of the product soaking up the water. Sounds like you had some watertight cars there.
When the CSX Terminal Services Center was being installed at Newport News in the 1980’s it occasioned a FULL on the ground check of every track in the terminal. The check ‘found’ about ten cars of ‘coal’ that had been ‘lost’. According to the ‘side cards’ that were attached to the cars - they had arrived five years prior to the time of the check. But that isn’t the unique thing - the cars had trees three and four inches in diameter and about 20 or 25 feet tall growing out of the ‘coal’.
I have also seen ‘coal’ that the Consignee’s inspectors had rejected - the quality of the coal was more on the order of black painted dirt. All coal is not the same and the Shippers and Consignees are dealing with commodities that are expected to have specific metalurgical properties - if the consignees inspection finds the load is not up to the appropriate standard they will reject it.
Sometimes they get lighter.
Over 60,000 Pounds Of Ammonium Nitrate Goes Missing From Train
https://news.yahoo.com/over-60-000-pounds-ammonium-152000456.html
I would think coal gons would be tight so as to not leak coad dust. Whereas old gons used to haul scrap steel would probably have a lot of holes knocked thru the bottoms.
60K pounds is a part load in today’s railroading. I have doubts that it was ever loaded. You don’t load 100 ton cars with 30 tons of product.
At B&O’s Curtis Bay after coal hoppers were emptied - rotary car dumper - the cars would be inspected to see if they were in sufficient condition to haul imported iron ore that was unloaded from vessels at the Curtis Bay Ore Pier - some times the ore would be loaded directly into cars at the ore pier, other times the ore would be loaded from ‘ground storage’ locations around Curtis Bay (ore could be loaded into dump trucks at the pier and driven to the storage locations for later movement to the destination mill).
Bottom dump coal hoppers don’t have to be and are not water tight.
Rotary gondolas have little drain holes with float plugs along the bottom of the car. The weight of the load presses the plug into the hole and closes it, but if the car is empty and starts to fill with water the plug will float up a bit and allow the water to drain out.
They aren’t perfect seals, a little bit of product often leaks out and a during winter a hot load like coke or sulphur fresh out of the plant can lead to some spectacular icicles along the bottom of the car if there was snow inside.
Sometimes the plugs fall out along the track or when the car is emptied, leaving a hole that the product will most definitely spill out of. This is just one of many things that loading facilities watch for when they inspect newly arrived empty cars.
Hopper doors are most definitely not watertight.
I wonder if it was a 3 or 4-bay hopper with about 30 tons in each bay, and only one was found to be empty.
Leaking hoppers are a common occurrence, and spills of everything they haul are common sights along the track and in yards.
I’ve seen some pretty old and dilapidated looking hoppers in fertilizer service out here. If they haul ammonium nitrate they will carry dangerous placards (oxidizer).
Well, normal coal hoppers are not water tight. But, if you are concerned about losing coal dust, then you haven’t taken into account all of the dry coal dust that blows out of the tops of the cars during transit! Years and years of dust gone with the wind!
I was pushing one coal train at fifteen mph through downtown and the coal dust cloud was horrible. I felt sorry for pedestrians walking close by. Of course this amount of dust was rare, but, once a coal train got up to speed it was rare to not have to close the windows. Pusher units coupled next to the train collected a lot of dust.
IIRC, this has been a problem along the powder river route, with those selfsame fines contaminating the ballast.
We don’t usually see many coal trains along the CSX Chicago Line through Utica. I happened to catch one several years ago. It was enveloped by a black cloud.
I wonder how long it takes this coal train to lose 100 lbs. of coal: