What products are carried in the beer can tank cars?
Back to the future…From that thread, sulfuric acid, slurries, petroleum derivatives, and some other commodities - and that thread itself contains a link back to an earlier thread.
Also, from a different forum on a different message board…
My best guess would be beer. But I dunno. Are the cars painted so you can tell from the label if they are regular or light beer? If they are Budweiser, I’m sure some would argue if it really is beer.
What do you think is in it?
Sez corn syrup on side…
Well our drivers that deliver to Memphis and Denver see ones going to Coors all the time. One driver asked and into Denver they are empty outbound they are hauling the Wort to make the beer to other Coors Breweries in the nation. COORX is the reporting marks on those.
Before I retired in the early 2000’s; I was a fairly frequent visitor to the Anheiser-Bush Brewery, Shipping area at Columbus, Oh… Saw some tank cars on that site, either being loaded or unloaded… An employee told several of us they were hauling what was an incomplete product [wort?] used to make beer(?).
A-B had plants all over the country, and it seemed logical at the time that more than just containers would be moved about to facilitate production(?).
There was a recent Thread here that got into a discussion revolving around the Molson-Coors [nee: Coors Brewing] Brewery near Harrisonburg,Va.
Linked @ http://cs.trains.com/trn/f/111/t/255707.aspx?page=2#2863535
Part of that discussion had to do with Coors [Beers] being shipped in rail tankers from Colorado to the Virginia facility. It was first used as a bottling plant, a shipping point for East Coast distribution. It was later enlarged, and now brews those beers in Va.
Around the time of the first Obama run for President 2005-2008 (?) there was some advertising by A-B that took a ‘swipe’ in a TV commercial at the fact that Coors was shipping their beer in railroad tank cars.
There was, at least one TRAINS magazine article that covered the Coors Brewery in Golden Co., and its’ plant railroad. I do not remember the year of that article’s publication.
The company I worked for at one point before 2000 ran a fleet of tanker trailers for Stroh’s Brewery. We hauled Memphis Water up to NJ, and Fruit Juice ba
I know- always remember to read the fine print.[8-|]
Thanks for the information. This is very inportant to me since I am writing a program to control my model railroad and I want it be able to act EXACTLY like the prottype railroads
WHAT OTHER COMMODITIES REQUIRE SPECIFIC CARS TO CARRY THEM?
all help will be greatly appreciated.
Ira
“Silver Bullet by Rail” by Mike Danneman, Trains, April 2006
Food has been shipped by train almost since railroading’s inception. Beer in bottles or cans has moved in boxcars for generations, but it has only been in the past 20 years that one brewery has been moving it by the tankcar load.
Every day, a fleet of white tank cars moves batches of beer from the Coors Brewing Co. plant in Golden, Colo., to a second brewery in Memphis, Tenn., and a packaging plant in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, near the town of Elkton.
But the connection between Coors and railroading doesn’t end there. Like many other brewers, Coors receives ingredients by rail, and it even operates its own in-plant railroad at the Golden brewery, the largest of its kind in the world. The brewing connection carries over to the BNSF locals that serve the brewery at the end of the 16-mile Golden Subdivision twice daily; they’re well known as “beer runs.”
As part of a nationwide distribution expansion, Coors opened it
In a past life I was an Inspector with the Bureau of Explosives, the organization that wrote what are now the Hazardous Materials Regulations of the DOT.
Each hazardous material has one or more tank cars authorized to transport it. See 49 CFR parts 100-199.
In very broad terms most liquids are authorized in nonpressure cars, while compressed gasses require pressure cars. Non pressure cars have test pressures of 60 or 100 pounds with safety valve start to discharge pressure of 75% of test pressure. Most corrosive products have frangible disc safeties, not valves.
The car photographed is a Class 103 car, most likely built before 1960. Their distinguishing feature is the expansion dome. The dome in the photo is a 2% typical of flammable liquids. The more modern Class 111A cars carry the vacant space for expansion in the tank and have no expansion dome.
Pressure cars have test pressures of 300-500 pounds, again with safety valve STD 75% of test pressure.
Nonhazardous liquids generally move in Class 111A cars. This is not required by DOT regulations, but the car leasing companies prefer DOT spec. cars to the equavalent AAR spec since DOT spec cars can be used for hazardous material while AAR can not and there is very little difference in cost as between the two.
In general cars will stay in a particular service for an extended period. Changing service requires at least that the car be washed out. In general cars will return empty to the origin shipper.
Physical size of the tank is largely a function of product density given gross weight limits. The denser the
" I wonder what’s in it?" Reminds me of the classic film, “Angels With Dirty Faces” from 1938 with James Cagney, Pat O’Brien, Bogart and Ann Sheridan (Yow!) They’re depicted as kids in a train yard, the boxcar read something like Acme Fountain Pen Company. The young Cagney’s character says what I wrote in the opening sentence here. Cops come, they catch one but not the other. One becomes a priest and the other goes to the electric chair. No guesses at to who ended up in the chair.
A visit to Google brought numerous examples like this:
Essentially just a short tank car.
Unless you’re talking something like this:
I think Walthers offered a kit for this at one time…
That is a 111A100W1, uninsulated, with top operated bottom outlet in the center, manway cover offset to the left and safety valve further left. There is no hazardous material placard, but they sometimes got/get lost or not placed.
The car is a bit unusual in that it has an underframe. Most 111’s are stub sill cars. The car is an early build, as indicated by the underframe and I note the photo date is 1969. Whatever service it is in, the product is quite dense, hence the small tank size OR it is a nominal 70 ton car.
The reporting mark is not a big leasing company so it would be possible to determine owner/lesee and make a reasonable guess as to product on that basis, maybe.
Mac
To my knowledge, there is no official definition of a “beer can” tank car but when people use it they are generally referring to very short (usually less than 40 foot long) tank cars.
According to the October 1971 ORER the reporting mark TCX belonged to Texaco but the cars were listed under General American Transportation, so GAT evidently managed the fleet on behalf of Texaco, and could well have leased the cars to Texaco.
The size mystery is solved. The car is only 100,000 pound capacity, a nominal 50 ton car. Previous generation 50 ton 103W cars for gasoline ran about 12,500 gallons which would be a reasonable guess for capacity of this car.
Mac