I have a general transportation question. How would revenue like coal, coke, iron ore, and limestone have been hauled?
Coal is easy and would have been in open hoppers; from the earliest days until present. However, what about the latter three? Were they always transported the same way, or did the method change at some point in time? If so, when was change(s)?
Thanks,
Tom
Iron ore has been transported in llttle bitty hopper cars for about forever. Until the invention of taconite, when it was transported in slightly extended little bitty hopper cars.
Or so I believe.
If you can’t tell, I love LITTLE BITTY iron ore hoppers, and only wish I could come up with an excuse to run them. I mean: a real excuse. Like they actually ran on the SP&S.
Ed
I suspect you are aware that iron ore in the United States was transported by ore boats on the Great Lakes.
So, your question did not restrict the transportation to the environs of the USA. In other parts of the world, I expect they do/did what was necessary.
But. It is interesting that of the components you list, iron ore is the one that would include water transport. In the USA. As opposed to elsewhere.
Ed
The only place I can think of that still does that is the DM&IR. The other large fleets like the B&LE and PRR are long gone. You can use a half loaded 3-bay hopper with iron ore and back haul coal in the same car. You couldn’t do that with the smaller ore cars.
Coke goes in hoppers with high side extensions. Or just any old regular hopper. Just you can carry more if you’ve got high sides on your hoppers because coke reaches the weight limit slower than coal. Iron ore goes in ore jennies or jimmies (depending on your region) or gondolas of about the same size. After the 80s, those half full hoppers. Limestone can be shipped in pretty much anything that’s got an open top. Its not a particularly picky material about being exposed to the weather.
In the early days of railroads, I’d guess that gondolas would have been more prevalent in coal service, and for some situations, may have remained the preferred method. After all, it’s not easy to shovel coal out of a hopper at a facility not set-up for such cars. Besides that, labour was cheap.
The situation for coke was probably similar, although the big users of coke were the steel mills, usually making their own. Industries like that and power plants were likely an impetus in the development of hoppers, as they would have developed their technologies with the economies of scale in mind. It would be much quicker to unload the cars through their hoppers than with shovels.
Keep in mind, too, that gondolas also came with drop doors and then drop bottoms, so they wouldn’t necessarily be phased out of a particular service unless the unloading process changed.
I’ve read that limestone was often shipped in hoppers, but that they were loaded to only half their cubic capacity, due to the greater density. I have, however, seen older photos, and current day ones, with hoppers fully-loaded with limestone.
Iron ore would have been the same situation as limestone, but to a greater degree due to the even greater density of the material. I’ve read of ore in hoppers being only a heap in each individual hopper pocket of the car.
Ore cars, with a shorter wheelbase, could be fully loaded, and ore cars for pellet service often had side extensions or the pellets were shipped in larger ore cars, due to their somewhat lower density than ore.
Much coal shipped nowadays travels in gondolas, larger and higher than our conventional concept of a gondola. These cars have no hoppers, but are equipped with couplers which allow the car, in its train, to be emptied rapidly in a rotary dumper…
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And likewise in Canada, but the ore still had to get from the mine to the ore dock.
Perhaps in the U.S., but it’s still transported in ore cars in Canada, sometimes only to an ore dock to be loaded into a laker, but also directly to some of the steel plants where it’s used.
The steel plant where I worked got most of its raw materials (ore/pellets, coal, and limestone) by boat, but made their coke in-plant, and had a system of conveyors and a fleet of hoppers to move it to where it was needed.
Wayne
Thanks for the answers so far, fellas. Although I failed to specify, I was strictly interested in transportation via rail.
So the coke, iron ore, and lime stone would have been transported in open hoppers vs closed hoppers? I sorta wondered if the any or all of them might have needed to be covered to protect the minerals from the elements, or the minerals from the metal hoppers or gondolas.
If you spend all that time and fuel drying coal in ovens to create coke, it seems sort counter-productive to have it get wet again from either rain or snow.
Tom
On my layout limestone is transported as a slurry. Do a quick search for 14,000 gallon kaolin tankers. Also crushed into powder and transported dry in airslide and/or pressureaide hoppers, similar to flour and grain. Also transported in 500-pound bags on centerbeam flatcars or in boxcars. Similar transport for other similar stuff: kaolin, bentonite, phosphate, potash, gypsum, etc.
Iron ore as taconite or hematite in shorty ore cars. Heavy stuff. Famous wreck because iron ore was loaded into coal hoppers. The cars were twice as heavy as they should have been.
Robert
The LS&I/Ann Arbor shipped ore in ore cars during the winter from Michigan’s Upper Penisula to the Ann Arbor via the Ann Arbor Car Ferries and then by the Ann Arbor to the DT&I to the Rouge.
There is a picture in the Ann Arbor book of a car ferry capsized in Lake Michigan because they loaded a full string of ore cars on one of the outboard tracks of the car ferry.
Jim Hedigar related to me about picking up a load of those ore cars in the winter at Durand and slowly hauling them to Flat Rock yard since the bearings were frozen in the cold winter weather.
The DT&I would haul coke from Ironton, OH to McClouth Steel in Detroit, MI in coal hoppers with extended wood sides on top of the hopper.
Rick Jesionowski
Not always. Iron ore for the Bethlehem Steel plant in Bethlehem PA came from Cornwall PA via the Cornwall Railroad and then the Reading, and then later from Grace Mine south of Reading via the Reading, both moves all rail, no boats. The Grace Mine run by rail was maybe 40-50 miles, tops - but they shut it down and started receivine ore from South AMerica by boat into Philadelphia and then by train (Readign again) from there to Bethlehem - about an equal length train trip. But somehow this was cheaper.
Go back even further, and there was an iron mine not far from where the Lock Ridge Furnace was in Alburtis PA, some of that was hauled 100% by rail from there to Crane Iron Works in Catasauqua (not very far away). One of the original reasons for even building the Catasauqua and Fogelsville railroad, later the Reading’s C&F branch.
On the Reading, the iron ore was hauled in the same hoppers used for coal traffic, but only partially loaded due to the higher density of the iron ore. There were some specialized cars, but not the little ore cars common in the Great Lakes area. The Reading specialized cars were to keep the loads from freezing solid in winter (water was sprayed to keep the dust down when loading). The were more or less in captive service between Bethlehem and Cornwall.
–Randy
There were a lot of gondolas in coal service from the start of railroading up through the 1970s. The CB&Q ran their USRA clone composite gondolas into the late 1960s.
Jeff White
Alma, IL
In California, Kaiser Steel Mill received it’s iron ore from only a few miles away. It traveled by rail. The limestone came about the same distance but from the other side of the mountain range. They made their own coke. The coal came from Utah and New Mexico. The trains were unit trains in dedicated service.
Iron ore was originally shipped in standard gondolas but later switched to shorter length ore cars because of it’s heavy weight was too much for the gondolas and they couldn’t be loaded to their capacity. 
Coal was shipped in standard gondolas and unloaded in a rotary dumper. Later it would be shipped in high sided gondolas.
Limestone was also shipped in standard gondolas and unloaded in a different rotary dumper.
Natural iron ore comes out of the ground wet and sticky. Rain or snow wouldn’t really affect it.
When natural iron ore was plentiful on the Mesabi iron range, ore cars were brought down into the pit by switchers (like 0-6-0 steam engines) and loaded directly by steam shovels. The ore cars were then sent to marshalling yards like Biwabik or Hibbing, made into long trains, and brought to Duluth MN or Superior WI for dumping into ore boats. Putting the ore into covered hoppers would have been a lot more time / work / expense for little or no benefit - loading would have taken a lot longer, and when it came to dumping the ore on the dock, workers often had to prod the sticky ore from above to loosen it enough to slide down into the dock’s ore pockets.
Ore cars were originally made of wood, so 24’ cars was about as long as you could get given how heavy the ore was. Ore docks were built based on that size, so that continued into the steel ore car era. Since taconite pellets are round, there’s air between the pellets, so extensions were added to many ore cars so that they could carry the same tonnage of pellets as they did iron ore…plus the wet sticky natural ore could be piled up well above the top of the ore car, while pellets could only be loaded to the top or they’d spill out.
p.s. the DM&IR hasn’t existed since 2000 or 2001 IIRC. It’s CN now.
When discussing the transport of coke, the railroads took varying approaches. Some extended the height of coal hoppers and gondolas to handle the much lighter coke. When I was on the Mississippi Gulf coast in 1974, the Louisville and Nashville was using a fleet of heavily modified 40 foot steel boxcars to haul coke. The roofs had been removed, the height of the six foot wide main door reduced by 1/3 and smaller auxiliary doors cut into the sides midway between the main door and the ends of the car. The door openings were screened, making the coke visible to the observer. These cars were numbered in the lower 30000s and given the AAR designation of GDC making them in fact a gondola. L&N also added 2’3" side and end extension to some 52’6" gons for bulk coke loading. They also used 52’6" gons hauling coke in rectangular containers. Photos of these cars appear in Morning Sun’s “L&N Color Guide to Freight and Passenger Equipment” Vol.1. Southern Railway also converted some 40 foot boxcars to coke loading by removing the roofwalks and three of the roof panels, but without cutting additional doors, leaving the full-sized original door in place, instead of screening the opening as L&N did. Some railroads took the same approach, using surplus stockcars, simply screening the sides and removing the roofs. Most coke handling rolling stock seemed to begin life as something else.
When Kaiser finally closed Eagle Mountain, those SP ore gons in the 345xxx series (as produced in HO by Athearn/Roundhouse) ended their days in aggregate service in Texas, being unloaded by a backhoe that moved along the car tops.
Coal and limestone also went by lake boat. Two of the more modern (1958 and 1965) Great Lakes shipwrecks were limestone carriers.
Jeff
How would revenue like coal, coke, iron ore, and limestone have been hauled?
The revenue is hauled in a Brinks truck. The commodity is hauled in railcars. [:D]
Coal is hauled in hoppers and gondolas. 2 axle hoppers were used up until about 1870, then wooden truss side hoppers, then hopper bottom gondolas and drop bottom gons up until the 1890’s. After that, mostly hoppers (twin, triple and quad) east of the Mississippi and GS type drop bottom gons west of the Mississippi, although gons were also frequently used east of the Mississippi too (the old MDC 40 ft gon is basically the same as the C&O’s coal gon). In the 1950’s the coal was moved in hoppers rising from 70-90-100 ton capy. Starting the 1970’s the rotary gons for coal unit trains became popular and the multiple bay high capacity hoppers.
Coke was hauled in basically the same cars as co
I always love seeing a backhoe on top of freight cars. Backhoes are incredible machines.