Whats the smelly-est train cargo to haul? Pigs, manure, rotten potatoes, city garbage, sulfur? Or what else can it be?
tallow, hydes, sewage pellets, sludge, oilfield waste
Some of the late-night Metra suburban trains in summer.
The dreaded whine followed by the feared blue Amcrap.[+o(]
Worst I’ve seen (???) was a BNSF train at Eola yard in Aurora, IL that derailed some EPIC cars loaded with (now get this!) New York City human waste being transported to (IIRC) Arizona to be used as fertilizer in the fields there (this is documented in the latest TRAINS magazine article)…well, they put a few of these on the ground and they burst open and WOW, what a smell…they quickly cleaned up and put down straw and dirt and grass seed, but it took weeks for that smell to go away and when it rains even now (this was last year) I’d swear it still smells a little if you get close enough to the spot where they derailed.
Offal from a slaughterhouse. My brother-in-law was an engineeer on the TRRA in the Saint Louis area. He would sometimes get the night job of hauling 4 or 5 open gons full of offal from a slaughterhouse in East Saint Louis across the Merchant’s Bridge to a rendering plant in western Saint Louis. HIs lunch bucket was not touched on those trips, especially in July or August.
In the pre-EPA day, I worked a tower that was adjacent to a rendering business that processed and shipped ‘green hides’. The smell emanating from the car loads of hides was one thing…at 6 PM nightly, the company dumped their ‘effluvia’ into the river, while the smell from the hide cars would ‘knock your socks off’, what got dumped into the river would not only knock your socks off it would fold them and put them away in the sock drawer. There is something about the smells of decomposition that gets to the heart of the human psyche.
BaltACD,
you’ll kike this. B&O’s Metropolitan Sub’s Georgetown branch did strret running on K St NW here in DC, under the Whitehurst Freeway. I was in architecture school then, around 1970 and a project we were assigned for a restaurant adjoining the old Aqueduct bridge approach. Myer’ rendering plant was still there “and believe me they were open for business”. Their ingredients were trucked in with the back of the trucks open for us to view the contents, but the SMELL precluded further inspection. And in the street was a three foot sewage manhole cover improbably suspended (though wavering) over a gushing sewer replete with a lot of toilet paper among the identifiable objects… YUCK!!!
And the restaurant? I designed mine as a three hour dinner train up to Silver Spring with a summer stop at Fletcher’s and a commisary at the Aqueduct bridge. Got an A!!!
RIXFLIX.
Illegal immigrants.
A friend and I were train watching at the old station in Ashland Va, back in the late '90’s when a CSX New York City trash train came rolling through. This was in August, and all the other railfans eyes started reversing in their sockets! The two of us were hysterical, yelling “Oh boy, Rudy’s sending another load south!” I guess both of us being from the NYC area we took a perverse pride in the train. It’s a Jersey thing!
Try being crammed in a stalled PATH train under the Hudson on a hot summer rush hour! You’re, of course, part of it!
Another bad one was the smoker on the last train out of Hoboken on a Saturday night! You didn’t have to have your own smokes as the air was full enough for all plus!
I think there may be some confusion between certain molecules containing sulfur atom(s), most likely hydrogen sulfide, and sulfur. Many of the former do smell really bad; like rotten eggs in the case of H2S. I have used sulfur as a fungicide on plants, driven by piles of sulfur, and been by sulfur tankcars. Sulfur does have a slight odor, however it does not smell anywhere near as bad a hydrogen sulfide.