Greetings from my corner of the eastern wilderness,
One general question I have been examining for a number of years with regard to the transport of coal and iron ores is simply one of economics and the opportunities of scale as it relates to mass transportation of mined oresto export docks and power plants.
As the empty cars must be returned to be reloaded and the charge for the back haul of said cars is income to the railroad and an expense to the mine owner in addition to the labor and fuel involved:
If a more efficient method of mining mass transportation became available to the class one haulers, which allowed them the opportunity to go after more frieght taken by truck (as it would free up a huge number of locomotives and rail) to pursue more freight loads and even less than car load lots, is it something they would do if they did not have to transport coal or iron ore in quantity and be able to offer service to customers for less than 500 miles or more deliveries?
My question is simply would they at least examine the possibility or is the fact that the coal mines are a captive audience and whether a force majour happens or not they dont care?
And FYI no RR jobs lost and more RR jobs would created because of this and more normal operating schedules would become the normal way of doing things as the coal mines would no longer be an operating issue.
This could get fairly long! All of the great lakes steel companies received ore and some coal by ship so the ore cars never left the home road and most were under 100 miles to the docks being returned for more. So who got ore and coal by rail? Certainly the Pittsburgh mills although B&LE hauled coal north to lake Erie for shipment returning iron ore from the docks making other roads drool over a douoble revenue stream. USX Fairless outside Philly got Venezuelan ore up the Delaware river by ship when it had melt capability. About the only other mills I know of that were rail delivered were Kaiser Fontana California, USX Geneva Utah, Granite City in East St. Louis and Armco Middletown Ohio. Were hoppers used for ore? You bet so could they have gone to a coal source for return to the oigination point? Maybe. Railroads don;t seem to concerned with backloading as much as getting their cars back. In the 60’s and 70’s there was such a shortage many had placars saying something like, “Return to agent York, PA”. You can’t ship anything if you don;t have the cars available. By the way, When I worked at Armco Middletown Ohio you would have sworn the PC track was ballasted with taconite pellets so many spilled through cracks in the doors.
Coal, Minerals and other materials of a like kind required slow, steady and reliable delivery more than anything else. There are a number of trains rolling with coal destined to produce electricity and other uses. Usually those get dumped into the stock pile. I think power plants have a certain amount of fuel always on hand at all times.
The Great Lakes was not the only place coal got to play on ships. Norfolk Tidewater and Baltimore as well as other places had export coal, import ores and various other bulk materials at one time or another.
I think the way things are going, Australia is king with materials now.
Equipment has become increasingly specialized so backhauls are rare. TRAINS had an article a few years back about a backhaul arrangement involved ore from the Iron Range to Geneva, Utah and a coal backhaul from Colorado to a NIPSCO plant in Indiana. Backhauls of different commodities are difficult to arrange because the cars have to be cleaned out pretty thoroughly each time.
Anyway, my understanding of the question is different from the other responders. As I read it, the OP is asking about a rail line primarily or entirely devoted to the movement of bulk products of mines loosing that traffic to a more efficient mode of transportation. (Bite your tongue!) He goes on to ask that if that happened would the railroad use the newly surplus rail assets, such as unemployed locomotives, to ca
I see you points as well with regard to my first posting but,
The energy savings would more than justify regaining the less than car load lot business and getting trucks off the roads and taking passenger service away from the airlines with all the energy savings moving coal or iron ore and spending 7 cents a kilowatt hour versus 192 gallons per hour per SD-70 on diesel fuel would be incentive enough I would think.
Over the years there have been attempts to supplant railroads in the transport of bulk materials,particularly of coal. One of these was by mixing the coal with water and pumping it through slurry pipelines, which was actually done on a small scale. That method did not prove economical enough to take significant marketshare from the rails. there were also issues with finding suf
If you only had to pay 14 cents kilowatt hour instead of 192 gallons per hour of diesel fuel for the same job and increase efficiency and add jobs by offering more local service and still make money as the expense and back haul returns would be gone would that not be incentive enough if you knew of system that has been in operation for 30 years and has delivered mined ore in total being 60 million tons as of this year in one operation? Oh and this system replaced a site dedicated railroad that had been in existance for 47 years,
What “System”? Please tell us what you are talking about.
Aside from the fact that you just doubled the cost of the electricity to 14 cents per killowatt hour from an initial 7 cents per killowat hour, there are many other cost elements to consider besides energy.
And you’re not going to eliminate the backhaul problem with LCL/LTL or anything else. Freight doesn’t move in equal volumes in each direction on any lane. And every peice of transportation equipment that leaves point A for point B has to go back from point B to point A. The equipment is always in balance while the freight is not.
Over any length of distance beyond a few kilometers (I’m guessing here that you’re not a “Miles” kind of guy) the only transport mode that can be more efficient than rail for dry bulk transport is barge or ship. If you’ve got a better “System” then please describe what it is.
I guess this all means “No, the energy savings alone are not convincing.” There are other cost that can, and usually do, outweigh energy cost savings.
Sorry. I’m still not grasping what you’re trying to say. It feels like I’m suppose to solve a riddle, based on the clues given. Can you please explain what you’re talking about? Thanks.
I can’t let this go unchallenged (per the gospel according to John Kneiling [;)] ), even though it comes from our good friend and altogether wise and thoughtful observer of the transport scene, greyhounds. I realize that it’s not an absolute statement - the “can be more efficient” implies a possibility or a probability - but not a certainty of that. Nevertheless, on an ‘all-in’ “systems costing” basis, water-borne transport is usually truly competitive only at low speeds, and when either the traffic source or user is
Hoppers don’t work very well for Paper or White Goods. Open Top Hoppers fail to protect cargos like grain, Potash, Salt. Much of the Coal is transported in Aluminum Hoppers or Gondolas to save weight, but Aluminum doesn’t work with Iron Ore. Changing car construction to make a multi-purpose car likely would raise operating costs enough to eliminate any savings from backhauls, then there are loading and unloading problems, and the issue of cleaning the car. Just with a standard Open Top Hopper it can be a problem, it is undesireable to have any coal in a load of Iron Ore as it can affect the chemical qualities of the steel output, it is even worse to get Iron Ore in powerplant coal as it could damage the boilers. The idea of a multi-purpose covered/open top hopper was tried in Brazil where labor to clean the car is cheaper, but it was still a failure.
If the need to save oil became that acute, likely something could be done, but the most likely outcome would be less items transported over long distances.
I’d point out that the premise that coal and iron ore is only a one-way haul isn’t always correct. Here in Minnesota, ore cars hauling taconite to Duluth-Superior sometimes back haul limestone back to the pellet plants (to use in making the pellets). Also for many years in the eastern Great Lakes region, coal was hauled north to the Great Lakes ports to be shipped west to Minnesota and Wisconsin, and the same cars would be used to haul the iron ore coming in from those states to the steel plants like Pittsburgh. (The cars often looked empty, since they could only be filled about half-full, since the ore is so much heavier than coal.)
I can’t let this go unchallenged (per the gospel according to John Kneiling ), even though it comes from our good friend and altogether wise and thoughtful observer of the transport scene, greyhounds. I realize that it’s not an absolute statement - the “can be more efficient” implies a possibility or a probability - but not a certainty of that. Nevertheless, on an ‘all-in’ “systems costing” basis, water-borne transport is usua
The coal mines are not necessary captive customers. One thing that does happen to railroads is if they price the transportation too high the product (coal, wheat, whatever) becomes competitive in the market place. The best example I can cite is Appalachian coal in the european market. South African coal after apartheid became much cheaper inspite of the longer distance it had to travel. This was primarily due to the shorter distance it had to travel to get to port.
One of the other items that has happened in North America is the Mine to Mouth electric plants were the electric plant is located a short distance from the mine. And the coal is sent by a conveyor belt. It is considerably cheaper to move electrons on a wire (no back haul needed) then to move the carbon by rail(or barge or truck)
One place I see coal moving by truck is in China.(PRC) I can not understand how the drivers are making any money on this. Especially having to compete with a state owned rail network.
By the by you should have all kinds of stuff here. With Paul D North and Greyhounds throwing stuff in it should get lively.
Sorry! Somehow I got switched to the wrong thread, which is why this post has no relevance to this discussion!
When I lived in Vermont I’d occassionally see new Amtrak Superliners, among other passenger cars, which were built at the Bombardier factory in Barre. I’d see them interchanged with CV, later New England Central, at Montpelier Jct, moved with regular freight (but I presume unoccupied) on their own wheels. Transit/commuter equipment usually was shipped on flat cars.
Well,some examples. CN bought DMIR to get control of their excess line capacity for freight and containers.
It all comes down to economics, not just operating and maintenance costs, but the cost of capital to build the system in the first place. Energy costs aren’t the only cost.
It would be much easier to answer this with specifics. I have to assume you are talking about alternates like conveyor belts, pipelines, or some such.
Both are very common where there is no infrastructure and massive quantities have to be moved between fixed points. When the taconite industry was started in Minnesota there were studies to move the iron ore concentrate by pipeline to the consuming areas. It would have worked well, but the econoimics just didn’t work out compared to in place infrastructure (rail and Great Lakes). Even today, the benefits in operating cost don’t justify the capital cost.
The oil industry is different for some reason, maybe the fact that the product is shipped in such great quantities and is a liquid already.
Don’t forget that along with shipping ore or coal in a pipeline, you also need a fluid to suspend it like water. For every ton of iron ore you need 0.4 to 0.6 tons of water. For coal, because of its lower bulk density it closer to 1.2 to 2 tons of water. In some areas this is just additional energy, in others the water is simply not available. To work in that case, you need a parallel pipe to return the water, a “return the empties” if you will.
Conveyor belts are interesting too, but the capital cost there is even higher than a pipeline for long runs.
Mines tend to be in remote areas and there often isn’t enough general freight or LCL to justify a railroad without the ore or coal. Just look at how the railroads have cut back in Michigan’s UP or NE Minnesota wit
Some random thoughts applicable to this discussion…
During the 1970s in a effort to be “a full service transportation company” the Missouri Pacific system lines offered LCL service. Actually, it was more of an LTL business because most of those shipments moved via piggyback between break-bulk terminals. I believe MoPac more-or-less abandoned that service well before the 1982 “MopUP” merger because of expensive, labor-intensive, terminal costs.
Also during the 1970s the ICG, MoPac, and MoPac’s Missouri-Illinois subsidiary participated in circular movement of equipment that benefited Granite City Steel. Coal moving in ICG open top hoppers moved from southern Illinois to an M-I customer located south of Bonne Terre, Mo. That customer, after unloading the coal, refilled the ICG hoppers with limestone, a product which was then routed M-I - Bismarck, MO - MoPac - Granite City, Ill. After Granite City Steel unloaded the limestone, the cars then went back to the ICG for another load of coal.
Many years ago I remember reading something in Trains Magazine about a hybrid car that the Southern Railway was developing, It was essentially a covered hopper with a pair of side doors and a flat floor above the dump chutes. Essentially it was both a covered hopper for hauling a bulk commodity like grain and a box car for hauling finished products like cartons of breakfast cereal, paper products, and appliances. The design was an attempt to improve the ratio between loaded and empty car miles, but the car never became widely accepted. Again, as stated elsewhere in this thread, the primary issues that took away from this idea were cross-product contamination and the costs of cleaning t
), even though it comes from our good friend and altogether wise and thoughtful observer of the transport scene, greyhounds. I realize that it’s not an absolute statement - the “can be more efficient” implies a possibility or a probability - but not a certainty of that. Nevertheless, on an ‘all-in’ “systems costing” basis, water-borne transport is usua