Anyone who lives in the midwest knows that salt on the road in the winter time is a way of life. If you have ever paid attention to this process, you notice that A LOT of salt gets dumped on the roads.
Do trains haul a lot of this salt? Given the incredible quantity, I would have to think so. I guess the part that confuses me is that, in my experience, Trains do not haul salt to particular counties, given the massive amounts that counties go throuh during snow storms.
Gabe
The city of Ames, Iowa gets it’s salt by rail. It isn’t billed to the city directly, but goes to a private company who has the contract to provide salt to the city.
Jeff
A low value, bulk commodity, with 6 months to deliver it: sounds like a perfect item to ship by rail.
Ill have to ask the salt truck driver next time there doing the roads/lot at my work [%-)]
Quite a bit, yes. Most of what we get comes in from the west. I’ve never seen it billed directly to cities, but wouldn’t be surprised if a big city like Chicago could eliminate the middle-man.
Ever notice how a salted area of a street stays wet longer than the surrounding area? Well, the same thing happens on the covered hoppers themselves when it’s slightly damp out. These can be some of the scariest cars to put through the retarders, because if conditions are right, I mean wrong, there’s no slowing them down.
A local distributor (who gets his salt by rail) caused a bit of a stink here due to the location of his storage pile - next to the old freight house, which is bordered by residential areas. They did put a huge tarp over it, but the complaints still came in.
Milwaukee gets most of its salt by boat. Then stores it at the port in large piles with tarps. Then as needed it gets shipped out by rail and trucks. In fact with the winter we have been having the piles are already disappearing and its not even February yet.
Keith
Gabe: The volume could seem incredible if you look at a salt pile on the Milwaukee or Chicago docks, but it’s small change compared to coal. 40% of salt consumed in U.S. is used on roads, or about 22 million tons in 2005 (last year I have data for). If all the road salt moved by rail that would be the equivalent of 220,000 100-ton carloads or 2,095 105-car trainloads – not an negligible volume but only about as much tons as the coal used by three 1,500 MW power plants, but spread over thousands of destinations instead of concentrated to three.
Almost all of the road salt used in the U.S. is “rock salt”, e.g., salt that’s mechanically mined vs. salt that’s produced from brine, solar, or vacuum pan, meaning it’s cheap and impure, only 95-99% NaCl by volume.
Given where many of the rock salt mines are located – near to the Great Lakes, St. Lawrence Seaway, and Atlantic Ocean; the low value of salt (avg. U.S. $25/ton for rock salt FOB mine); and the fact that most of the population base in the northeast is accessible to water, my first thought is that a large percentage of the road salt moves by laker or barge for most of its journey between mine and city dock. In other words the cost of transportation (low) created the demand (high) but only in places where the low cost obtains, which are places close to navigable waterways. Major rock salt mines in the Northeast are at Detroit, Mich.; Windsor and Goderich, Ont.; Fairport and Cleveland, Ohio; Groveland and Lansing, N.Y.; and Magdalen Island, Pugwash, N.S.; and Sussex, N.B. All but the two New York mines are practically waterfront mines.
The actual number of carloads of salt used for road salt moved by rail I think would be time consuming and expensive to get at (you could use the 1% waybill sample), but it’s kind of fun piecing it together on the cheap. The Lake Carriers Association 2006 Annual Report says that its members handled 9.7 million tons, mostly from Canad
Carl – I’m presuming you looked at the waybills and saw these carloads destined to customers that are obviously road salt consumers, and that it’s not industrial salt, which is cleaner and more expensive. There’s a lot of industrial salt moved by rail. Is most of what you’re seeing coming out of Kansas and Oklahoma?
RWM
What is industrial salt used for?
Salting industrial French Fries.
The big use is to make chlorine.
In 2005, the U.S. used (in metric tons):
18.4 million tons for chloralkali chemical processes (salt is the primary source of chlorine; the coproduct from splitting the salt molecule is sodium hydroxide, aka caustic soda).
1.3 million tons for other chemical processes (water softening, sodium chlorate, sodium sulfate, and hydrochloric acid processes, and other mid-stream industrial processes).
1.8 million tons for meat packing, dairy (for texture, color, and fermentation control in cheese, ice cream, and butter), baking, and other food products
2.2 million tons for oil production (primarily as a flocculating agent in drilling fluids to increase density of the fluid)
800,000 tons for textiles and dyeing, paper production (to bleach wood pulp) metal processing (uranium, copper, aluminum, steel, and vanadium refining), leather tanning (to pull moisture into the hide and to inhibit microbial growth), and other industrial processes
RWM
I believe that the NS delivers salt to Chicago just north of Pershing Road. There is a branch which comes off of the line just east of Ashland Avenue yard. The branch snakes north to a large cone type structure.
ed
RWM, given what you said about rock salt coming from the east, I think it’s safe to say that most of what I’m seeing is industrial salt. I can look at the waybills; it would be interesting to see who gets it.
In nearby LaSalle, IL there is a river terminal which off-loads road salt from barges and stockpiles and tarps it until its hauled away by truck. I used to work for the trucking company that has the stranglehold on the salt hauling contract. We’d truck salt pretty much anywhere in the northern two-thirds of Illinois (except Chicago) and not necessarily the same place every year. There are a few river terminals up and down the Illinois River, where exactly I can’t remember but Joliet, LaSalle, Peoria come to mind. The past few years they’ve consolidated and closed down the smaller ones. Three different salt companies stored salt in LaSalle, Cargill being the name I remember and having the biggest pile. If I remember right, all three companies were based in Kansas…or at least had…bla bla bla salt company, KC-MO or KC-KS…on the ticket.
I don’t know how many barges were unloaded there, but each barge had approx. 1500 tons of salt. I want to say there were at least 100 throughout the year. There were times when almost all of the salt was hauled out of there and we had to sit and wait until more came up the river.
I can’t imagine hauling salt by rail, covered hopper I’d assume. When the salt is piled up and stored for a while the top layer turns rock solid, almost like concrete because of the salt getting wet and drying out again. Having to chisel that crap out of a hopper car would be the last thing I’d want to do.
I want to thank everyone for the excellent responses. As always, I have learned a lot.
RWM’s observations seem to make sense, as the origin of this post is the fact that I have never witnessed salt being loaded or unloaded, which I found odd. To my knowledge, I have not seen a salt car–although I am not altogether sure I would know it if I saw it.
I guess my confusion is, for instance, on NS’ old ex-NKP line between Edwardsville and Sorento (less than 50 miles), IL, NS onced hauled clay for several years. They would do it in 7-8 car train sets, not very often, I am guessing once or twice a week.
In contrast, I have seen loaded dump trucks of salt exit just a single county salt shed at a rate of about one per 15 minutes (sometimes better) during a snow storm. Considering the county I grew up in has about 4 salt sheds, that is a lot of salt! You would think that, if NS could make money hauling 8-9 car loads of clay 50 miles, it could make money hauling salt 230 miles from the great lakes to county salt sheds. Once you start multiplying these numbers by the number of counties with similar logistics, one would think that there would be a market for 3-4 county rail-served salt depots.
I am sure there are 100 reasons why my axiom is wrong, but airing my flawed axioms on here is how I learn . . .
Gabe
Gabe:
A railway can offer a truck-competitive rate on small quantities on short hauls, if:
There is already rail infrastructure in place on both ends and no investment required which has to be amortized by the freight movement. For example, a 500-foot spur off a yard lead with a hand-throw switch, no land acquisition costs, no major grading, no drainage structures is $100,000. The same 500-foot spur off a 79-mph main track might cost $2.5 million.
There is low cost equipment available and suitable for the commodity, say old steel 100-ton hoppers for $12-13/day per car
There is room on an existing train and the additional business doesn’t require additional crews or locomotives, so the railroad can price it incrementally.
The cars do not require intermediate handling in a yard and it’s a nice straight pick and drop at each end.
The shipper and receiver are both creating the product and consuming the product in close proximity to the spur on either end with minimal secondary handling, e.g., the clay pit is right next to the spur on one end and the brickyard right next to the spur on the other end.
Those are a lot of ifs. Returning to your example you observed on NS, 7-8 cars once or twice a week is 364-420 carloads a year, or 36,400-42,000 tons. It would take a good-sized city to consume that much salt a year – that’s 3,640 to 4,200 10-ton 3-axle dumptruck loads! If the city had 10 snowstorms a year, each truck makes 5 trips in the course of 2 days, the city would need 72-80 dumptrucks to deplete the pile. That’s about the fleet size you might find in a city of 500,000 – and how many cities of that size in the salt belt are not located on a navigable waterway?
Road salt might have rail-served infrastructure on one end but on the other it might have to be created. The cost of creating that infrastructure discounted in present dollars might never become positive.
Thanks for the info!
Where is chlorine usually made-near the salt mine? Doesn’t most chlorine ship by rail?
Generally chlorine is either made near the salt mine or near the consumer. There were 50 chlorine plants in the U.S. and Canada as of 2005, more than I want to type up, but here’s a sample:
Plants at or near the salt source:
Plants at the consumption point:
Plants co-located with the salt source and the chlorine consumer:
(Now you see why it’s called the Chemical Coast!)
RWM