This morning’s News Wire says CN is purchasing 1150 new covered hoppers. How much does a new high capacity covered grain hopper cost?
Guess $80-100K US. The purchase of new railcars is given very serious thought before they sign on the dotted line to make the purchase. New locomotives are in the $2.5M US neighborhood.
In this particular case, CN is buying grain cars to replace their existing fleet, much of which is now over 40 years old. I believe this latest order brings CN’s total to 3,650 cars, hundreds of which are already in service. CP is also acquiring many new grain cars for the same reason.
Grain companies like Louis Dreyfuss, Parrish & Heimbecker, Viterra, GrainsConnect (Australian/Japanese owned) and G3 Canada (Bunge/Saudi owned) have also purchased their own fleets.
All these cars are of the same design, and are being built by National Steel Car of Hamilton, Ontario, who I believe is now Canada’s only freight car manufacturer. They are 286k cars, which works out to a capacity of over 110 tons of product per car. Most of the old hoppers they are replacing are now only being loaded to 100 tons.
The numbers from this article work out to slightly over $130,000 CDN per car.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/hamilton/national-steel-cn-1.5702277
Does this mean more light branch lines to be abandoned?
Probably not solely because of the new cars, they could also be only partially loaded to operate on lighter track.
Many of the older hopper cars were originally rated for a higher gross weight, but have had their load limits reduced due to their age.
The cylindrical ‘Trudeau hoppers’ were built starting in the mid 1970s, and we also have a number of “Route Rock” three bay hoppers still running around in very faded Bankruptcy Blue paint (IC or GTW must have bought them after the Rock went under).
CN has poured money into branch line rehab out here over the last 10-15 years, they have spent well over $1 billion on the northern Alberta lines alone, replacing 85 lb jointed rail with 132/136 lb welded steel. This work continues, and is currently underway on the southern half of the former Great Slave Railway, to reach a new unit grain train terminal being built at High Level, Alberta (it’s closer to Yellowknife than it is to Edmonton).
If the branches have elevators that can load unit train tonnages in unit train time limits those branches will be rehabbed and upgraded to handle the increased loads. If the branches don’t have such elevators and/or other volume customers on the line most likely the line is living on borrowed time
Funny, I can remember when Southern’s “Big John” 100 tonners were revolutionary
https://www.pimstagem.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=157581
And, IIRC, strongly opposed by some.
At 100K a copy, why don’t the railroads take care of them? Just saw news video of aftermath of Hurricane Laura at Lake Charles. There was a long train length’s worth of covered hoppers on single track, all of them toppled over on their sides. Blown over by the winds. I realize you can’t cover every possibility, but why wouldn’t the railroad have pulled them farther inland? What a job to recover and repair them.
How far inland were they? How far inland should they have been? Was there space for them that far inland. One thing many people overlook in these kinds of conversations - rail cars occupy physical track space - where is the excess track space for them to occupy and what is required to get the cars to that track space.
At Grand Lake, La., 15 air miles from landfall at Cameron, on the Gulf. Reported as mile long train. Probably mile long cut of cars since line is a long spur from Lake Charles. All cars knocked over.
The drone shots I saw of these overturned covered hoppers, they all appeared to be fairly new and stored on a short line railroad. The exterior coating on the cars didn’t show any rust or weathering and the trucks all appeared to still be in dark black paint. I couldn’t enlarge the photos enough to fully decipher the reporting marks but, my impression was they are private cars.
Curt
One must also consider the logistics of moving that 100+ cars when there are revenue cars and motive power to get out of town.
Caught one reporting mark in one of the videos: SNHX5342, if I read it right. Sasol Chemicals or Shell Oil. Probably plastic pellet hoppers.
The freight rates that Southern proposed for the larger capacity cars was what was opposed.
Jeff
Still probably cheaper to put them back on their trucks and fix any damage then if they had been allowed to sit where water could’ve gotten over their trucks. Flood water and bearings don’t mix too well.
Jeff
As I said - where do you move them to as railroad tracks have finite capacities - over the years since the enactment of the Staggers legislation - the railroads have ‘right sized’ their operating plant with the intention of ridding the plant of ‘excess capacity’.
Storm Damage is just one of the costs of operating a business in a area that can be struck by Mother Natures wrath - just like it is anywhere in the inhabited world.
A decade ago a storm front passed through Walbridge, OH
https://weather.com/storms/hurricane/video/hurricane-laura-knocks-train-cars-off-tracks-in-louisiana
IIRC the hurricane was a Cat 5 with winds of 150+ mph. An empty grain car is a long tall sail for winds like that. I am in no way an expert, but my guess is that they would have had to be at least 50 miles away from the centerline of the hurricane’s path to be safe from being blown over, and possibly 75 miles. The same would go for boxcars and any other car with a large surface area. My guess is that there were a large number of such cars within 50 or 75 milles of the center of the hurricane’s path. As someone said earlier, that many cars would have taken up considerable track space for parking, not to mention the crews and locomotives needed to move them. By the time anyone can predict a hurricane’s path with reasonable certainty, time is very limited and a railroad’s employees would have been busy securing their own property and families. Been there, done that, Hurricane Michael (later determined to be a Cat 5 at about 153 mph) passed about 60 miles west of us in 2018; wind speed here was just over 60 mph.
Cannot imagine the effort to move the cars inland. All sorts of rules would have been violated especially brake test and operating rules.