North American Operations of the GATX Tank Trains

That many carloads is an awful lot of product to pump in and out of just a single hose connection, which at best would take too long and result in slow turn-around and cycle times and unacceptable costs, etc. The other extreme is each car having its own loading/ unloading hose, which is how most are done. Even with that, the 5 or 6-man crew that does the 80 to 96 cars at the terminal I’m most familiar with has several hours of ‘doing nothing’ time in the middle of the day, after all the cars are hooked up and draining, but before enough cars are emptied to start disconnecting and closing them up towards the end of the day.

A sensible compromise between those extremes is to break up the train into several cuts of cars, each with its own hose connection. The original loading site at Albany was set-up 4 tracks, each with about 20 cars per cut, which should provide a reasonable loading / unloading rate and switching time and costs.

There are valves in the hoseline to isolate/ ‘compartmentalize’ each car, so that the breach of one will not allow any others to also leak out through it. Look at my middle photo above - the box on the top of each car contains that valve. The hard-to-read stenciling at the inner end of each box says: “VALVE MUST BE CLOSED IN TRANSIT”. Next to that is a vertical line with a ‘bulb’ at the bottom that kind of resembles a musical “quarter note” - that’s labled as “OPEN”. Underneath that is a horizontal line with the ‘bulb’ at its end toward the middle of the car, which is labeled as “CLOSE”. The actual valve lever alternates between sides at the ends of the cars - here, it is visible on the left box - it’s the thick gray lever about a foot long which comes out of the box at about a 45-degree angle up towards the end of the car, then bends another 45-degrees to the horizontal and ends with a white handle. Part of a similar handle can also be se

The plant in Oswego either shut down or went natural gas. I saw one of the TankTrains headed there years ago - the only time I’ve ever seen one.

Here is my O Scale video of two short GATX TankTrains.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2VXGnyG6G

Andrew Falconer

Here are the O Scale models of the GATX TankTrain tank cars offered by Lionel.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5FxjQ0vWsY

I saw them in person in the 1980’s, 1990’s and the 2000’s on the Grand Trunk Western/CN mainline through Michigan occasionally. I have not seen one lately, since I can not see every single train from my house.

Andrew

To answer your question, GATX Tankers are just mixed in with the manifests. I always see them mixed in with manifests. Every once in a while, I’ll see GATX Molten Sulfur trains go through Mundelein on CN. Most of the Molten Sulfur, though is mixed in with manifests.

Gus

Looking at the photos, it seems possible to load a block of cars using a single connection. However, I don’t see how it is possible to unload a block of cars using a single connection.

How would the fluid flow from one car to another during unloading? Is there an internal piping arrangement that creates a siphon to draw fluid from one car to another?

Thanks.

Anthony V.

Each tank car does have a valve on the bottom to empty them using both gravity and suction.

Andrew Falconer

[tup] [tup] Andrew, what a great layout you have there. The trains seem real at first glance.

Thank you for sharing the video with us.

Cannonball

Paul_D_North_Jr wrote the following post on Wednesday, June 08, 2011 [in part]

"…That many carloads is an awful lot of product to pump in and out of just a single hose connection, which at best would take too long and result in slow turn-around and cycle times and unacceptable costs, etc. The other extreme is each car having its own loading/ unloading hose, which is how most are done. Even with that, the 5 or 6-man crew that does the 80 to 96 cars at the terminal I’m most familiar with has several hours of ‘doing nothing’ time in the middle of the day, after all the cars are hooked up and draining, but before enough cars are emptied to start disconnecting and closing them up towards the end of the day.

A sensible compromise between those extremes is to break up the train into several cuts of cars, each with its own hose connection. The original loading site at Albany was set-up 4 tracks, each with about 20 cars per cut, which should provide a reasonable loading / unloading rate and switching time and costs…"

Paul: To sort of expand on your point. I was reading in an articles on the Operation of the "GATX Tank Train’ in a real workd setting.

The story indicated that when unloading the cars wer broken down into groups of 12 interconnected cars, for the unload. The product was at a higher temperature than ambient while transported, ( Loaded at a high temp at origin(?). The unload time was boosted by covering the material pressurized in the cars with an inert gas ( Nitrogen(?). That pressure boost coupled with the flow of the ‘warmed’ product enabled a quicker unload times at Destination.

Sorry, I cannot remember the source

The cars above are DOT 111A100W1 Class cars. The have a GATX 98 Underframe so the oldest the could be would be late 70’s or early 80"s. They quit building the Type 98 underframe in about 1980 or 81. The remaining strings for the most part are in 13 car strings. I don’t think there has ever been a string 70 cars long. Possibly what was saw was a train with 4 or 5 of the 13 car strings coupled together.

Each car has a butterfly valve that is shut in transit. They are located at each end of the interconnecting 10" hoses. On some of the earlier cars the hoses were only 6" in diameter but they still had the butterfly valves to reduce the spillage should the cars derail and the hoses ripped off.

Robert

Back in 2010 and 2011 I saw several not-very-long strings of the TankTrain in CP’s ex-D&H Kenwood Yard, just south of Albany, NY.

There are several photos (none are mine) on the Railpictures.net website of the TankTrain in recent operations - see, for example:

http://www.railpictures.net/viewphoto.php?id=509198&nseq=0 (Quebec, Sept. 10, 2014)

http://www.railpictures.net/viewphoto.php?id=504799&nseq=1 (Quebec, Nov. 02, 2014)

http://www.railpictures.net/viewphoto.php?id=53219&nseq=21 (Oct. 2003 - note that the caption says “The trains consit of 4 block of 17 cars, for a total of 68 cars. Six trains runs daily.” The comment - “it can be seen 6 times a day- too dark :wink:” - also seems to confirm the 6 trains daily - ?!?).

And one of my favorites from Feb. 2006:

http://www.railpictures.net/viewphoto.php?id=133704&nseq=16

  • Paul North.

The September 10th, 2014 photo on the CN in Quebec shows the GATX TankTrain and a new tank train of oil product from North Dakota moved first by the BNSF.

There is a BNSF buffer service only covered hopper.

The next photo shows the new ARI or Greenbrier built oil tank cars.

When the link is clicked upon, they load up that webpage in this window tab, instead of in another window or even a second tab.

The CN GATX TankTrain tank car trains, shown in the 2003 and 2006 photos on the railpictures site, have no buffer cars between the tanks and the locomotives.

Canadian regulations are different than US regulations.

The CP/VTRS tank train operation from Albany to Burlington VT is still around as far as I know. It replaced the bulk oil barges that came up the Champlain Canal in the mid-1980s. Gasoline, Diesel and #2 heating oil are all carried.

I commissioned the facility and unloaded the first TankTrain at the Carson refinery back in 1983. The train consisted of six sets of 12 cars. Each 12 car set was pressurized with nitrogen to push the crude oil out. All six sets were unloaded simultaneously. It took four hours to unload a train. With the proper “persuasion”, it was possible to unload a full train in a little over 90 minutes.

How many cu. ft. of Nitrogen were required per train?

And could you recover any of it, or was it just vented to the atmosphere?

Probably left in the empty consist to reduce issues with vapors, then vented (perhaps through vapor separation for EPA reasons) incidentally when consist was refilled. Around 78% of the atmosphere is nitrogen and it used to be relatively cheap to separate as a ‘by-product’ of LOX for steelmaking.

I suspect nowadays you would separate purge nitrogen ‘on site’ with molecular sieves as done in the packaging industry. What was used then? Pressure bottles or cryo?