This is an image of the old Gainesville Midland and Seaboard yard in Athens, GA. You can see that two tracks are elevated, and at least one of them is on a sort of homemade trestle. Has anybody seen this before or know that it is? I’m guessing that it is for unloading something.
Cannot see because cannot open link. But there are embankments and trestles in yards for humping cars; there are embankments and trestles in yards for unloading coal and/or sand, too. Without picture or knowledge of yard, we cannot tell for sure.
It’s fixed.
From what I can descern from the photo…actually two as one showed gons on a stub which seems elevated while the other showed a locomotive set in the middle of the yard toward the east. The one center track seems to be elevated and passes a building…this appears to be a scale of some kind. This is definitely not a hump yard nor is the elevated part of the yard a team or delivery track for any reason. The southwest corner stub tracks might be a team delivery track or just a pair of tracks. Knowing more about the yard, its location and history, might change my guess, but from what is shown, scale track in the middle is my guess.
It would appear that the final footage of the track that contains the cars goes onto a trestle type affair that looks to have two pockets that open top dump truck could back under and receive a load directly from a rail car placed above it… Such set ups were common in the days of coal heat and the vendors would then deliver the coal house to house from the dump truck.
As someone who goes back to the days of delivery of residential coal by rail, I’d have to agree with what Mr. Balt says about that trestle. It doesn’t look very tall, in which case it would take a fairly small truck to fit under there. Problem is, that would probably require the hopper above to be closed from time to time–and that wouldn’t be an easy job to do manually. Perhaps instead a conveyor belt or two was placed under the trestle, which would make more sense for loading a larger truck which would then take the coal to the company’s own coal yard. That’s how it was done in western Michigan when I was growing up, only the opening under the tracks was little more than half that size, and not much more than three feet tall, if that. The largest coal company in town had two belts for different grades of coal. One handled larger lumps of coal (perhaps a couple of different sizes), which usually arrived in C&O or N&W 50-ton twin hoppers; the other (a completely different spur in the yard) got finer coal, delivered in L&N 70-ton triples for the most part. There were also two other companies in town receiving coal, but not as much.
Looks like an old abandoned coal dump trestle.
That is what it appears to be…It does not look too deep so I suspect that they used a conveyor to load dump trucks and the like…
To me it seems unlikely to be an unloading facility of any sort. Two reasons
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the part that appears to be open below the track is right at the end of the track. To unload a car it would have to be pushed all the way to that end, then pulled a long way out and another car pushed in. There is no track beyond that point to be able to push several cars in to unload one at a time and then push it farther along to unload another car.
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looking at the site using Google Earth’s Street View, it really does not appear to be elevated above the rest of the area. No room at all for truck and very little room for a hopper and conveyor/elevator to empty the hopper.
I think it is just 2 stub end sidings and the ballast is washed out along side one of them and with some other ties laying along side the track it looks like a trestle, but is just wood laying on the ground.
It would appear that the CSX roadmaster is unloading ballast into backhoe or front end loader buckets from ballast hoppers equipped with Miner/M-K variable gate doors into dump trucks.
With the dearth of air dumps around anymore, why not use a M/W track in a dying yard to do this on what is now a temporary track. I suspect the operating department destroyed the switch in a derailment, replacement authority was denied and the roadmaster got creative. Smart move as long as the operating folks are spiked out of the track. (Rails make lousy structural beams - I’d be looking for some 9" x 18" bridge stringers to support the rail and hold gauge)
Both BaltACD and CShaveRR:
Are right on about the possibility of the trestle pictured being a delivery point for a bulk material delivery. Fifty years ago they were pretty common in City settings for delivery of coal for residential and commercial uses. The coal would drop into a pocket under the trestle and it would be loaded into dump trucks for the final location for use. Construction materials were done similarly. The elaborateness of the trestle for the rail cars was dictated by number of different products a company would need, and the available space for the rail line.
They were much more common in the first half of the 20th century. “The Flying Diesel Corps” story below illustrates another use of a Industry trestle by a railroad crew.[:-^]
“…On September 27, 1955, a 50-car O&W train in Hamilton, New York traveling on a mainline approached a switch set for a siding which led to a coal trestle. Although the engineer fully applied the brakes, the train continued up the siding at more than 30 miles per hour (48 km/h) and through the trestle. It was learned that the 213-ton EMD FT diesel locomotive at the head of the train “flew” a distance of 150 feet (46 m) beyond the coal trestle from an elevation of 15 feet (4.6 m); total time of “flight” was later estimated to be between six and seven seconds…”
Old coal dump trestle now used by MOW to unload ballast and rock.
Pretty beat up, which is normal in older yards…lots of weird uses come up for caboose tracks and cola dump tracks.
Just read the mudchicken’s reply, nuff said.
Well thanks for the replies everyone. I’m thinking that it was for coal. There are still three of those left around the city, but all of them are much taller. The idea of a conveyer makes a lot of sense. It is now filled with ballast, so the idea that it was repurposed makes sense.
I wish that I had pictures of it, as I saw it in person once years ago. I’ll add that there are three “bays.” The middle piers are supported on stacked heavy timbers. 9”x18” sounds about right although I remember them being a little more square than that. They are only about 2 feet long and stacked with each layer perpendicular to the first. Those rails in between are just “floating.”
I just ordered a track chart off of ebay for the Gainesville Midland. I can’t find any pictures or