In the article in the Feb 2012 issue of trains about heaviest trains, there is a mention of a UP train. Thetrain is 184 cars, 24,000 tons, and runs from Mason City, Iowa to Forth Worth, Texas. The commodity carried is…sand? What makes this sand so special as to be carted half way accross the country?
Side note- I just got the February Trains Magazine. Is it 2 weeks late, or two weeks early?
It has to be Silica Sand, and the size and shape of the grains have to be correct.
I don’t remember a lot of cats in Fort Worth, but there appear to be a number of foundries in town:
http://www.midland-midco.com/bronze-foundry.htm
http://www.texasaluminumfoundry.com/
and so forth.
I also suspect that some of the sand is being used for frack’ing. The sand grains help keep the fractures open.
Also certain types of sand are used in glass-making.
You can bet that it was sand for fracking. They are the ones taking sand by the trainload. It is going to the Eagle Ford Shale Oil feild in South Texas.
Can you explain what frack’ing is?
Fracking is a process that is being used to fracture underground formations that when fractured release oil and/or Natural gas. The process involves pumping quantities of sand and water under high pressures into the formations to create the fractures. I am certain the technicalities of the process would fill volumes of printed material, materials that I probably would not understand if I read them.
My good friend Murphy - and with all due respect - it appears you have been living under a rock (or buried under a good-sized pile of those tiny rocks known as sand !) for the past couple of years. I know we’ve kicked it around on some threads here in the past few months - even Fred Frailey has had a couple of his blogs on it during that time.
“Fracking” is short for “hydro-fracturing” or “hydraulic fracturing”, as concisely and correctly summarized by BaltACD above. It is a huge and contentious environmental issue in this corner of the world and several others across the US right now, relating mainly to groundwater pollution, well contamination, etc., etc. Just search for it using you favorite Internet search engine, and stand back to avoid being crushed under the literally millions of results that will surely follow. Here’s just one (of approx. 7,960,000 that I got) for instance (usual disclaimers apply, although it does look to be fairly well done): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_fracturing
Which, by the way, had 35% of the investment purchased by a Japanese firm…Texas shale oil produced by a Japanese firm…something wrong with that picture?
No more so than a Chinese company winning contracts to construct bridges in California funded by the U.S. Goverment’s TARP program to help alleviate unemployment…
q 368 usually has sand in gons going eastbound.here in defiance our gm plant uses sand in its casting block operation.Like to watch q 509 and 324.Have seen sand hoppers with the new csx logo on them.It is becoming more rare to see ones with B&O,C&O and chessie on them.
stay safe
joe
Indeed, all glass is sand (silicon dioxide), and has other elements included; the other elements determine certain characteristics of the glass. Soda-lime glass is the most common, and expands greatly with changes in temperature. Boro-silicate glass expands much more slowly, and, until fairly recently was used in the making of Pyrex and Anchor-Hocking glassware. Now, both companies use more soda-lime glass, and, even though it is tempered, it must be handled with care when it is hot–and even then it can shatter in your hands. (My not-so-humble opinion is that if it is not boro-silicate, the glassware should not be called “Pyrex.”)
I had an interesting experience when I was taking physical chemistry in college. Only Pyrex glass tubing was to be in the lab (you cannot tell the difference just by looking at two pieces of glass). One exercise was to take two pieces of tubing, fuse a smaller one to the side of the other at a right angle, bend the one coming out of the side until it could be brought back to into the side of the larger, and fuse it in place as a side arm. When I had the side arm brought back into the larger tube, there was a small hole that needed to be filled, so I took a piece of glass rod, melted it, and filled the hole. After the assembly had cooled, the glass from the rod was crazed–because it was soda-lime, and not Pyrex glass, and shrank more as it cooled–somebody had brought the wrong glass rod into the lab.
Quartz is pure silicon dioxide, and it expands even more slowly that boro-silicate glass; it is used extensively in the manufacture of computer chips, for it can stand higher temperatures without sagging (about 1050 degrees Celsius is the highest operating temperature for quartz furnace tubes; if the need is to go higher than that, silicon nitride tubes
While it is a bit OT, I srongly agree that the Pyrex name should only be used for boro-silcate glass. I real simple way to tell soda lime glass is to look for a greenish tinge on the edges.
Here is a link with a cool video that describes the process. Now that we can produce synthetic silica sand that is capable of withstanding the higher pressures, we are able to drill and frac deeper than we used to. The natural sand limited wells to about 8000 feet deep, now with the tougher synthetic sands we can frac up to 18000 to 20000 feet. and for modern fields drilling to 15000 feet is the norm.
Synthetic sand ? What’s next- imitation dirt? [:o)]
What would you make synthetic silica sound out of ? …and is it hauled in railcars?
Probably out of silicon and oxygen. Silane (SiH4) is a compound used in the semiconductor industry to make glass to cover the chips. When it and oxygen meet up, you have an instant reaction which results in the production of silicon dioxide (along with carbon dioxide and water). If your process is not carefully controlled, it is possible to get finely divided sand instead of glass. Some processes use dichlorosilane or trichlorosilane instead of silane–but the idea is the same, with hydorgen chloride as another byproduct. If your desired product is sand, you would control the process so as to produce the sand that you want.
Let the hazmat transportation experts tell us about shipping the components (I can say that you do not ship silane by air).
Because sometimes they use substitutes for the sand in fracking, they often use the word “proppant”, as it props the fractures open. One of the first substitutes was sintered bauxite (aluminum ore). Other ceramics are also available. They are even starting to apply nano-technologies for lighter weights…
Methyl Ethyl Awful.
All three of them.
In case of a small leak, isolate to 100 feet.
All three are gasses.
For those with a copy of the ERG at home:
Silane: UN 2203
Dichlorosilane: UN 2189
Trichlorosilane: UN 1295.
FWIW, here in the Aurora, IL area we have sand mines near Oswego, IL that help Illinois Railway (formerly Illinois RailNet) build daily trains of sometimes 100 plus cars of silica sand that come from IR into the BNSF Eola yard and are then sent elsewhere (likely to gas fields to aid fracking). It’s amazing that these mines are so big as to support 100 car trains EVERY DAY!