What would plastic pellets be stored in? Concrete silos? Steel grain type bins? I plan to model the business on a medium to small scale but see enough usage to recieve plastic pellets in hoppers, probably one or two per session, maybe using Atlas’s ACF 3560 centerflows or something similar.
99% of the storage is in the covered hoppers themselves. Entire yards are devoted to this purpose and called “Storage in Transit” or “SIT” Yards. Dayton, Texas, is an example. At the receiver, the ideal is to use the hopper as the storage bin, sucking out pellets until the car is empty. Some small amounts of storage occurs at some (but by no means all) receivers of pellets, in steel bins, usually cylindrical bins oriented on-end, on stilts, to enable piping and valves to come in underneath the bin without requirement for any underground construction. Usually the storage bins hold maybe 1-3 covered hoppers worth, but often not even one car’s worth of capacity.
The reason why covered hoppers are suitable for storing plastic pellets but not grain or cement or fertilizer is that plastic pellets do not germinate, ferment, consolidate, or set-up into concrete. Grain requires careful temperature and moisture control for storage, and cement and fertilizer are water-setting or water-soluble.
RWM
How should I model the unloading then? A pump rack of some sort? modified grain elevator? Would the Atlas ACF 3560 centerflows be the right kind of hoppers? There are also air slide hoppers but I don’t think those are the one’s I want.
Steel cylindrical bins/silos, 8-10 ft in diameter with conical bottoms, supported on legs. They could be standing on the ground or on the roof of the building.
The cars are emptied through a stainless steel or aluminum pipe about 6" in diameter that runs along the ground next to the tracks witha “wye” connector every so often and large diameter flexible metal hoses That connect to the outlets on the hopper bottoms.
Walther’s retired their model of a plastic pellet storage faciltiy (933-3081). There is a very similiar facility here in Bradford that produces plastic bottles, so the picture on Walther’s website may give you some ideas. Also I noticed at the unloading facility here in my town, is what I assume is a static discharge device. Two steel pipes as tall as the hopper cars with a cable running between them. Neat detail to model.
Chris
None of the above.
Try something like this:
http://www.atlasrr.com/HOFreight/ho5701.htm
http://www.walthers.com/exec/productinfo/932-7155
Make special note of what the hopper outlets look like. They don’t unload straight down by gravity like a grain hopper, but are vacuumed out by attaching hoses to the pipe outlets on each side.
There’s a large rail-truck transfer company near me that stores over a 100 hoppers of plastic pellets at a time in their facility, which is just a bunch of pairs of tracks. Pellets are transferred from railcar to truck using the machine below, which is basically the heaviest equipment they have.
A facility that actually uses some sort of storage silos, on a very short spur, might have their vacuum/blowing equipment in a small shed with the silos, and use fixed piping or long hoses to reach the cars.
Is that cable mounted such that it’s over the cars? That’s common for covered hopper loading/unloading locations for workers to tie their safety harnesses onto. I’ve also seen them in lumber mill loading areas for workers on top of centrebeam cars running banding over the stacks of lumber. It’s 15 feet from the top of a railcar to the ground.
You are all at fault. They should have asked me what scale and what time period I model. The 5701 hoppers are great, even looked at them for other purposes, untill I realized they were manufactured about 10 years before my time frame. I would recomment not suggesting I get retired stuff, I would never find it. I’m limited too what Walthers offers me in the monthly mail outs and the local train shop. I don’t do ebay, problems with the past and quite frankily I would never use a credit or or paypal (bank account info needed to use) over the internet. The web is great but untrustworthy with all the virus’ and hackers. And all that was given was HO. I don’t do HO. I will never be one of these people who have enough money to own a house of their own so I probably never will do HO. It stinks, I like the detail better, I wouldn’t get much in 8x2 foot area, even if I have multiple decks going from the floor to the ceiling. I would probably go Z scale but heck, I could get two HO trains in DC for the price of one Z scale DC engine. From the prices I’ve seen I could go down the LTS right now and buy an N scale loco with a decoder and still have enough money left over to get a decoder for my existing loco.
For the most part I’m planning the company on only getting one, maybe two hoppers of pellets per session. The main building I plan on using (Pikestuff Milton A. Corporation) has a nice little metal shed that if I left it as the pictures show would be in the way so I have to move it, and this little shed would look great modeled as a dedicated machine shed for the vacuum system. As long as I put it by the tracks and have the pipes going to it that is.
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Is that cable mounted such that it’s over the cars? That’s common for covered hopper loading/unloading locations for workers to tie their safety harnesses onto. I’ve also seen them in lumber mill loading areas for workers on top of centrebeam cars running banding over the stac
The local plastic company here stores 'em in silos.The pellets are transloaded from rail car to truck for final deliverly.
Also the pellets can be shipped in gaylords in 50 foot boxcars…