Greeting fellow forum friends,
I would like to talk about tra***rains.
I would like to know where they go and come from, what kind of cars they use, what number series and reporting marks they have, and any other bit of information about tra***rains.
Some of the information I can’t find like car numbers and destination of those particular cars so I though I would ask you folk.
Thankyou for any help you can give me and others who might want to know too.
Junctionfan,
I’m not sure how relevant this is to you, but a new garbage train has started running from Clyde yard, west of Sydney Australia, to Tarago, about 250 km (a bit more than 150 miles) south of Sydney. The garbage is then transferred to truck and shipped to an abandoned “Woodlawn” silver/lead/zinc open cut mine, which will be filled and covered in due course.
Because the transfer is involved, the garbage is packed in 40’ standard (8’ x 8’) shipping containers (owned and registered to a US company, but the containers were built in China).
The containers are carried on standard flat cars, in this case 45’ cars with one container each. The containers appear to be “heavy duty” construction and the doors have serious rubber seals. When I inspected the cars and containers, there was no “garbage” stench, just a mild smell of disinfectant, although the cars had only been used a couple of times at that time. There is a second small door in the “blind” (non door) end of the container which I assume is to allow an hydraulic ram to push an internal bulkhead to clear the rubbish from the container at the unloading site.
At the city (loading) end, there is a large building with roller doors on the rail access and I assume this is again to avoid the garbage smell escaping.
I don’t know how the containers are loaded, but there are a couple of large fork lift trucks in the yard, so I assume that the conainers are removed and loaded in a special location where the garbage can be pushed from a hopper into the container, then replaced on the wagon.
The containers are a plain grey colour with only basic lettering, numbers, capacity and so on.
Peter
I remember at one time (I’m pretty sure it was a blurb in Trains mag) they chatted about a tra***rain that was idling in town near some residential areas, the residents started to complain about the smell… the railway just started to idle the train further down the line in a more industrial setting…
I believe it was waiting for crew changes.
I saw quite a few when I was in Washington D.C. last summer. I happened to have a hotel room over the tracks and CSX ran several through each day. They were simply long TTX or other road name flats with four grey containers on them. I snapped a few pics from my room, but they aren’t the best quality due to the glass and all. I’ll scan them up if you are interested.
They come through the csx line in Akron Ohio almost daily. Through our region the trash is carried in open top hoppers. Something along the lines of pulpwood cars. If I remember correctly the trash comes from a big city in the east, New York is my first guess second is phili. I would assume they are going to trash dump in the midwest. I was listening to my scanner one day and one of the workers called the yar “the akron dump” because it started to smell from the cars left in the yard. I got a good laugh out of that.
Andrew
I saw one of these heading south on CSX through Alexandria, VA a while ago; probably one of these runs. The containers each had a small “WM” [Waste Management] logo on them.
That train was probably K 277 We smell (I mean see) it often here in Baltimore MD.[xx(]
I have one train often on the Trenton line. It uses flats with large green containers. What is the reporting marks on the flats?
Also what kind of car information can anybody give me on ECDX (ECDC Environmental)?
I would love that please. I wonder if the containers are 20 footer that fit in 20 foot hitches on the flats like regular intermodal containers.
Here are some pics of Northwest garbage trains. Many of the
larger cities, Seattle/King County, Portland, Everett, have run
out of land fill space so the garbage is shipped to Eastern
Oregon where it is landfilled/buried.
http://www.railpictures.net/viewphoto.php?id=80514