Hi everyone, I’m totally new to this and I feel like a fish out of water!
Let me explain why:
I am an engineering student working for a mining firm this summer which is in the planning stages for a project which will include a ship loading station at a deep-sea port accessible by rail.
They gave me the job of trying to design/draw (on AutoCAD) the railroad at the port. I have limited space to put 150 cars plus 2 locomotives on a loop so that the train can unload then return to the mine site.
Suffice to say that I know very little about all this. But so does everyone else in the office so in trying to find information, I stumbled accross this forum. I hope some of you might be able to help! There are lots of details, like the tightest radius I can use and the terrain is hilly and right up against the coast. Am I in the right place?
Thanks for your time!
Welcome, Nat!
There are a few people on this Forum who ought to be able to help you.
I assume that you’re talking about coal here–the commodity is important because it may have an effect on the size of the cars you’d be getting.
Speaking from long, sad, experience, the mining firm needs to hire a consulting engineering firm with deep railroad experience immediately! Track layout is not simple or easy. Details matter, and only from long experience do you know those details. All I will accomplish by giving you guidelines on radius, etc., is lead you further down a primrose path toward disaster.
Time and again we see shippers come to us with a site layout already having invested enormous amounts of time and money into a site, they or their plant engineers thinking that track is a no-brainer, that is totally unworkable from both operating and engineering perspectives – but they’ve already purchased the site! I spent the better part of the last year working with a shipper building a $2 billion plant that had purchased a site on which the necessary track simply would not fit. Unfortunately the shipper had already spent $200 million on land, permitting, and design before they ever approached a railway engineering firm. We ultimately figured out some workarounds but for about three months, there was substantial risk the $200 million would have been wasted.
In another unhappy example, recently an ethanol producer had hired an industrial engineering firm to prepare standard plans for 15 ethanol plants in the Midwest. The industrial engineering firm imagined it knew something about railroads, and did all the railroad design. After the designs were finished, the ethanol producer took the designs to the Class I railroads and requested their agreement to serve the plants, and the Class Is rejected every single plant. Redesign, additional land acquisition, additional grading because some of the sites were unsuitable for rail, and relocation of the plants ultimately cost so much money the ethanol producer went broke and had to sell out its interests to one of its competitors at pennies for its investors’ dollars.
If you wan
Natman:
Please listen to Railwayman (RWM), he speaks the brutal, honest truth. I won’t add to the horror stories for fear of being accused of piling on.
If you ever, post graduation, plan to go for licensure in your discipline, this would be a classic case of operating outside of your area of expertise with drastic repercussions (especially in the port scenario)…
Mud
Ok, so you see exactly why this is important and I’m glad I asked! At this point, our company is not responsible for the actual design yet, it is the port authority which has allocated some space to us and we need to maximize it for our stockyard & ship loading facilities. We are producing iron ore.
The port has some plans for future improvments and they won’t reveal what they’ve got so far, but we are trying to get a kind of “plan B” in case what they offer us is no good. Thank you guys so much for your input! I am taking what you say very seriously. Just looking to learn as much as I can here…
The kind of things I want to know are:
-What sort of general workarounds might be possible when in tight quarters?
-What are the more common (& least expensive) methods for handling track grade & cuvature? Without knowing squat, I am guess you fill in or build supports where needed.
There is already some existing rail in place for loading at the port but it is privately owned. We’ll be using what ever we can, but we need to get our train off the other company’s track to avoid delays to us & them. Some side tracks will no doubt be required. By our estimate, we will need about 8500 ft on our loop. I’m working on getting aerial images & topographic maps, etc.
Natman, I am impressed by your earnestness. However, what you are asking for in this forum is the same thing as asking a doctor to offer you tips on do-it-yourself brain surgery, or asking a lawyer for free legal advice – it is unethical and possibly illegal for a licensed professional to answer, and anyone without a license answering you is engaging in the illegal act of practicing a profession without a license. Any engineering advice you get you should ignore. A professional engineer is opening him or herself to a lawsuit if they offer you advice in this forum. The only advice he or she can ethically offer is to engage a reputable engineering firm with proven railroad experience.
Mud and I would be doing you and your company a serious disservice by trying to help you from afar with only vague knowledge of the situation, needs, and contrainsts. You will not come up with a solution with our help, only with an “answer” that has a strong likelihood of being disastrously wrong. Check the ethics and legal guidelines for the jurisdiction you will seek licensure in – you are getting dangerously close to a line beyond which you are placing your personal future at risk. I’m dismayed your company even put you into this situation – what on earth are they thinking!
RWM