Central Texas originates a lot of gravel trains. Where are some of the destinations for trainloads of crushed white limestone?
dd
I would imagine some of the trains are ballast trains. Others may be going to road paving and concrete companies or companies that sell gravel to them.
http://www.trainweb.org/southwestshorts/grr.html
here is a link that might explain…
Dump trains, ballast trains, gravel for concrete plants, crushed limestone, used in roadbeds, lots of things…
Ed
Ed - that’s a very interesting website. After scrolling down a little, the second photo is a train with a fascinating car on the end. Complete with a conveyor belt for unloading. It would be great to see it in action!
Dave
If the load comes from a limestone plant, chances are that it will be going to a coal fired electric power plant. The power stations are crushing and burning the rock in some way to lower emissions at the coal fired facility.
The majority of the S Texas rock trains go to commercial aggregate dealers (road & building construction, concrete yards, subbase). Very little of that rock is used as ballast. The majority of it goes to destinations in south and east Texas.
Dave H.
Kinda neat to see it in action…you finish your sub road bed, space your ties, spike your rail, and they come along, and lay you a nice ballast profile…all you have to do if follow up with a tamper and profile cutter…
Mudchicken can give a more indepth detailed description, but if the sub roadbed is done right, you can have working track real fast.
I like it when we get their Ortner cars in here, they have nice, wide end platforms to ride!
Ed
I didn’t think much central Texas limestone was used for ballast - except maybe on the Austin Area Terminal Railroad (ex-SP) - because it is a little to soft.
dd
Limestone can be used for ballast. Not all, but it must meet certain criteria. Look at the mess BN had in the PRB when they used limestone that had a high dolomite content.
Thje train you saw was a Georgetown Dump Train. They had an article about Georgetown a few years ago in Trains. I got to see one in action here in Lafayette years ago. There is a conveyor belt that runs under the cars and up the boom and is dumped. They were using it here to stockpile material. I do not know what it was for, but it looked like fairly fine limestone and it was being dumped at a Feed & Seed distributor. It was probably for use in agriculture as we have very acidic soil here and limestone will lower the pH. IIRC, it was a 15 cut of cars.
Limestone isnt the only thing to come out of Georgetown, they have a pretty big gravel pit, and a granite quarry too.
Most of the County Court Houses here in Texas are built from native granite, as are most of the break waters, jetties and sea walls, along with bridges and other local structures.
But GRR does haul a lot of limestone.
Up around that part of the state, limestone buildings are very common, and very beautiful.
Ed
I currently live about 15 miles from the GRR but I have never seen the dump train in use. I have seen it parked a few times.
The most common way I have seen of unloading gravel gons is to back a tracked backhoe up ramps to right on top of the gravel - then craw along the train on the gravel, scooping the gravel out as they go.
dd
I think limestone is used as “sinter flux” in steel mills. Its added to molten iron, or steel, to collect impurities and forms slag which is somehow removed.
The addition of lime will raise the pH of soil; lime slurry is used in water or wastewater treatment to raise pH also.
The CTX limestone is generally unsuitable for power plant scrubbers or metallurgical applications.
The granite Ed is talking about generally originates at Granite Mountain and a couple of other small operations out beween Burnet and Marble Falls. Granite Mountain is where the pink granite in the TX State Capitol bldg comes from. GM is one of a number of huge granite knobs in CTX. Heard estimates that GM has at least several hundred more years worth. The junk stone from there (culls, etc) goes to jetties, with the smaller screenings going for landscapes and some for ballast.
The owner of GRR also owns texas crush stone. They mainly use thier dump trains to haul crushed limestone. if yall would like to see more information about the dump trains check out GREX or georgetown rail equipments web site the have alot more of them than GRR. and about the lime stone being used for ballast doesnt happen anymore and not all granite can be used either. http://www.georgetownrail.com/
Have any of you seen the HERZOG ballast trains. The dumping is controlled by a computer linked to a GPS satellite. I was dumping ballast at midnight running 17mph as the cars automatically closed and opened when they came to a road crossing, switch or whatever didn’t need ballast all over it.
Gravel trains go to Heaven[angel].
Coal trains go to…[}:)].
I know that a lot of the crushed stone comming out of central Texas goes to TXI which operates aggregate plants and steel mills in Texas
Oh yeah man, way cool…and all the gravel train engineers are like really reallystoned, dude…
Erik
Gravel trains go to Florida. From there the gravel is sprinkled irregularly across I-10 and I-95, apparently to keep local windshield repair businesses profitable.[}:)]
It could be worse - in Mississippi, the highway dept. spreads gravel several inches thick on highway shoulders. There are so many glass-repair businesses in a lot of places you could spit and splatter three of them. I never did figure out why anyone in their right mind would put gravel on road shoulders.