I’ve driven past the Vulcan Materials loading track a few times in the Kenosha area (near the power plant). There are usually 20 or so hoppers and a pair of GP’s (along with the coal train power) hanging out there. Does anyone know who Vulcan supplies (i.e. where does the rock go?)
Thx - Stack
Try the web site - www.vulcanmaterials.com/kenosha
I know that they supply a ton of different chemicals to industrie. Some pretty nasty ones at that.
Pretty much all over the Midwest. Vulcan is a HUGE corporation so it is a little difficult for you and I to track where specific shipments go. Generally there is a rock train that runs to Chicago and is individually parcelled out from there. Or at least that is my understanding. Mark, (fuzzybroken),Keith (kschmidt), Jay (jeaton), Carl (cshaverr) or a couple of the others here probably know more.
Mike
The rock is dug at the quarry in Racine, near the intersection of Three Mile Road and Hwy 32. Most of it used to be trucked out of there, but the residents that moved nearby started to complain about all the truck traffic (even though the pit was there since early last century), so Vulcan decided to train the stuff from Racine to the facility you asked about. At Bain, the rock from the night Rock Job is sorted by type and size, and sent out mostly by truck to various locations, and by train to the facility in Gurnee along Hwy 41. I know some of the rock sent by train to Gurnee is used in road construction.
The day Rock Job goes on duty at Bain at 0800. They go empty through Kenosha on the Farm sub to the Kenosha depot, then go north on the Kenosha sub to the facility in Racine, where they set out the empties and pick up a loaded train. They then take it on a reverse route from Racine to Kenosha, west through Kenosha to Bain, then south on the Milwaukee sub to Gurnee. The job often does not get done in the 12-hour limit.
zardoz-You da man!!
The Vulcan web site provides a historical time line of the company. Around 1972, had a tour of a dozen Vulcan facilities in Alabama and Western Georgia. That included a look at what I believe was their first operation, a slag processing plant at a Birmingham steel plant. Because of its porosity, slag makes a good rail ballast.
The history notes that Vulcan’s largest single purchase was the Reed Crushed Stone facility located east of Paducah, KY on the Tennessee River at Kentucky Dam. Interesting story in itself. That quarry operation was just a small local business. Don’t know exactly how it happened, but Reed, Sr. made a sizable fortune providing stone for the TVA project. Upon his father’s death, his son David, rather young at the time, inherited the business. With some help from a business associate of his father’s, the younger Reed took over the business operations, and I am sure did a quite good job.
He made the facility a major rail to water coal transfer facility. He and the business associate also purchased the ICG’s Paducah-Louisville line (The Paducah & Louisville Railroad) and the Paducah shops.
Old Ben moved about a train a day through the facility and I spent many days over there. It was a massive operation. Lost track of of the business after I left the coal company, and this was the first I realized that Vulcan had acquired the company.
Jay
Jim, there are usually two crews on the rock train during the peak season (May-October).
Both crews are called out of Waukegan, where a crew van picks them up and takes them to Bain (or to Upton- see below) One crew is for the 8 AM to 11-1 PM run (ending whenever they get back to Bain). Another crew goes on duty around 3 PM and takes the train back to Ives (Racine). This time, however, when they go back, they bypass Bain, head south to Upton (Gurnee), and then come back.
Sometimes the crew ditches the train at Upton because they do not have time to park it back at Bain for the morning’s run. In this case, the morning crew must take the train north from Upton to Bain in the early morning, and then head to Ives.
Perhaps the operation has changed since either you or I got our information.
My info came from the crew themselves back in September. And as I also was driving for the crew transport company for a brief while back then, I became somewhat familiar with that aspect of the operation, and I never got called for Waukegan; the crews always went on duty at Bain and were transported to Vulcan in the crew cab. However, I never talked to the night crew, so I am unsure of how they actually operate now.
Hmm…not sure, Jim. The info I read was from the 2005:3 issue of North Western Lines.
I have also seen this played out a lot of times though. Sometimes the crew does skip Bain and heads down to Upton in the afternoon, but this only usually happens when there is already a train being broken up at Bain Vulcan. If the crew does stop at Bain (usually), they usually get picked up by a cab and leave the engines there. Later, another crew comes with the van and picks these cars up for the second run to Ives.