Not many details at the link, like whose property, but pictures indicate it was a stack train in Knoxville. No injuries reported.
Film at eleven, I guess.
NS
Does hazardous waste travel in stack trains?
Not in containers like that. The ones you see in the pictures are typically filled with consumer and other goods. Containers for hazardous waste and the ones you see on “trash trains” are different and aren’t stacked, at least not to my knowledge.
I don’t know. But a better question (which I should be able to answer, but can’t) is what restrictions apply to hazardous material with a value or delivery necessity justifying intermodal shipping – perhaps radioactive material in shielding, or specialty chemicals. I think there’s an absence of placarding on articulated well cars, which might be a strong indication; at a minimum, I’d think even ‘minimum’ categories of nominally hazardous materials would either be single-stacked or kept ‘on the bottom’.
I am not aware of any particular loading restrictions when loading stack trains.
As a matter of logic it would be beneficial to load the heavier containers on the bottom level of double stacks. The bottom level of stack cars are equipped to load multiple 20 foot containers which would normally be used for commodities that weigh out before the cube out. 40, 48 & 53 foot containers can be secured on the 2nd level where 20 footers are the 1st level. If 40, 48 or 53 foot containers are the bottom level, there can be NO 20 footers on the 2nd level as the longer containers only have hardened mounting posts at the 40 foot position - no loading posts at the 20 foot level.
Murphy,
Hazardous Waste is a subset of Hazardous Materials and virtually all of them can be and are transported in packages by truck and by intermodal. I have seen many hazardous materials in 55 gallon drums and many conumer products move in boxes with an inner container.
There is a 1000 pound exemption from placarding for most classes of Hazardous Materials by truck and IM, but hazmat of any type must be shown on bill of lading and waybill.
Basic rule is that truck rules apply to IM, which makes sense in terms of consistency.
Like Balt, I am unaware of any restriction peculiar to stack trains.
Mac McCulloch
No argument,on what Mac mentioned, since he,and Balt are certainly aware of the railroad side of Haz-Mat handling on rails.
I would be somewhat suspicious of H/M ‘goods’ being handled in regular enclosed containers. The Federal Rules are pretty onerous, where containers (or enclosed,truck-trailers are used for H/M ladings). See partial, FR @ https://www.fedcenter.gov/assistance/facilitytour/landfills/hazwaste/
Receiving points for H/M in the South are fairly limited, and in the entire country, something around 20 (give or take) site that receive H/M materials. With some H/M materials, if spilled into a 'container; cleaning is not an option, the damaged
EPIX trash container cars with containers loaded
Plenty of hazardous materials moved in containers. Usually not an entire container, but mixed with other items. The required information appears on the train list, just the same as it does for a loaded car.
There’s a lot of everyday items that are considered hazardous materials. Especially when in larger quantities during shipping. I think most people when they hear “hazardous materials” they immediately think of tank cars full of explosive and/or toxic materials.
Jeff
CSX is prohibited from carrying certain commodities through Washington DC. UPS frequently ships containers that contain a volume of these restricted commodities - they have to be indentified on the Bill of Lading as well as the Waybill information. The existance of these shipments then get flagged on the Train Documentation for the train.
The restrictions apply these commodities being carried in ‘Reportable Quantities’. A Reportable Quantity is nominally a full car load or a full trailer load. Shipments with Reportable Quantities must have appropriate Placards affixed to the car or trailer. Not having placards afixed where they are required involves a large penalty for the shipper - so that short cut to confusion rarely happens.
In real life, when a crew reports they have one of the restricted shipments to the Chief Dispatcher, a party in Intermodal is contacted to research the official shipping papers for the car. In 99.99% of the cases the restricted shipment is NOT of a reportable quantity. The crew gets informed of this and is instructed to ‘physically observe’ the particular car or trailer to insure that it DOES NOT display placards for the shipment. The shipment is allowed to proceed. The 0.01% of the time that a reportable quantity and/or a placard are found - the car is set out and the trailers/containers will be drayed to destination over the highways.
A carton or two of BIC cigarette lighters trigger this situation from time to time - also other seemingly innocuous products also trigger the alerts.
Plenty of New Jersey sewage waste treatment plant dried waste pellets shows up in SE Colorado every month to get spread in the fields for the truck farms in the Arkansas River valley…in those cars…
Thats some crappy information. From now on I cannot possibly buy any food from Colorado!
Does John Deere still make and sell the only product he refused to stand behind? I know that they were quite commonly used to provide help in growing the plants in the field.
Would you expect they would not?
They will stand behind the product - just not when it is in operation!
We don’t see many of the traditional version arount here - most of the farmers are turning it into a slurry and spraying that on their fields. You definitely don’t want to be in the line of fire with them…
Or downwind.
Or driving with the top down adjacent to a recently sprayed field.
Any different than the stuff emminating from the local feedyards? In the meantime - most of that is yellow onions, corn or white wheat/winter wheat.
You wouldn’t want what we fertilize our yards with either (Comes from Ft. Collins WTP/STP http://www.therichlawncompany.com/products/fertilizers/richlawn-turf-food/ )[dinner][dinner][dinner]
But you go into a hole in the ground, breath that bad air and hang around those maniacal dangerous tommyknockers?
