I know scrap yards sometimes take RR cars to cut them up for recycling as they often have tracks serving them. Are there any large places that just scrap RR cars and engines or places that specialize in this? Do they sometimes save and sell the trucks? Do engines or other parts get sold? Around where I live I know of 1 steel boxcar sitting near grain bins for storage and another place out in the country with a wooden boxcar sitting about 200-300 feet back from the road.
There is an automotive junkyard in Phoenix called Ecology Auto Wrecking - it’s on 27th avenue just north of the ex-SP Phoenix line, though not directly served by it. They do metal recycling of all sorts there, as well as automotive recycling. On occasion, I’ve seen freight car trucks by the dozens in there. I’ve also seen passenger car trucks, as well as other various cut up pieces of freight cars. I’ve also seen EMD 16-645E3 engines in there, complete with turbos, just sitting on their sides on the ground in various states of damage (it was a sad sight).
There is usually many sections of railroad rail in there at any given time.
There are places like that al over the country. Just soth of Chcago in the rough suburb of dior is NRE’s main facility. Here is a phoo of thir backot. They have plenty of old EMD power there, including an F40C, an F7, SP High hood Geep, SD45-2, and dozens of old end cab switchers and first generation geep rebuilds. They build Gensets here and rebuild and sell or lease locomotives.
LARRY’S TRUCK AND ELECTRIC, INC. (located where?) operates like a regular automobile scapyard, except it is for locomotives in addition to trucks. The scrap locomotives, sell usable parts to railroads that can use them, including museum operatons, and occasionally will recondition, repair, and sell a used and operating locomotive. Anything not usable is comapted into steel crap cubes and sold to steelmakers.
Dixmoor isn’t that rough. About 2 miles from where I grew up was (is?) a scrap yard operated by Hyman-Michaels at 137th and Avenue O. They have been scrapping freight cars and locomotives for years. Chrome Crankshaft formerly occupied a corner of this facility. The Purdy Company also has a small facility near Powderhorn Lake at Brainard and State Line Rd.
Though it is not a railroad burial ground nor scrap yard, the Pacific Southwest Railway Museum (http://sdrm.org/) in Campo, California has acres of cars, apparently in perpetual storage. It is probable that this organization has easily acquired rolling stock that was being retired and had a desert location with very low humidity, no rain, etc. that allows such preservation until a use emerges.
This may be sort of like the desert locations where airplane leasing companies store planes until needed.
On the east coast, they often went to Naporano (now Metal Management, I think), located in the Ironbound section of Newark NJ. Here’s a Bing Bird-Eye view, but no locomotives to be scraped (the white boxcar, I’m not sure if it’s to be a victim or not).
Here’s a Railroad.Net thread about Naporano, with links to images (alas most of the links don’t work anymore, it’s an old thread). However, the last image works, of some PC E units being scrapped in 1980, does work. I personally remember seeing the yard south of Naporano jammed pack w/ old NYCTA subway cars (late 1980s) waiting to be scrapped - sort of a sea of red bodies + white roofs (this was before they began reefing old subway cars enmasse). Sorry, no images, this was before digital photography and as a college student back then I never really carried a camera…
The only problem with railroad scrapyards is the hoppers and gondola that are used to haul the scrap are often so beat, you can’t be sure if they’re not there to be scrapped themselves.
I have read that Pielet Brothers in McCook, Illinois - next to EMD’s La Grange plant - scrapped a lot of locomotives, especially those that EMD received as trade-ins on new units. For example, see the article under ‘‘Pielet Brothers Scrap Iron & Metal Company’’, about 2/3 of the way down this web page on -
Locomotive Dealers and Scrappers
COMPANIES KNOWN TO BE IN THE LOCOMOTIVE
BUILDING, REBUILDING, RESALE, AND SCRAPPING BUSINESS
Compiled by Don Strack
(Listed alphabetically)
This page was last updated on May 2, 2010.
http://utahrails.net/loconotes/dealers.php
Who knew ?
But, missing from the list is Intercontinental Engineering (or similar) in the Kansas City area, if I’m not mistaken. They had several of UP’s gas-turbines after they were removed from service, per the book Turbines Westward by Thomas R. Lee (1975). So I’ll let Mr. Strack know about tha
I work for Alter Railcar Services in Mankato MN and we dismantle cars and locomotives. All usable components are resold to various reconditioners and everything else is cut up for remelt. We also buy scrap off the street. Our facility in Des Moines IA only cuts up cars and locomotives. It amazing some of the nice cars the railroads dispose of. Our two locomotives that we use to switch our facilities were both bought as scrap, a 1940 ALCo HH100 and a 1954 ALCo S-4. Parts from railcars are availble for sale to the public.
And of course sometimes the railroad does the work themselve.
Port of Tillamook Bay has been scrapping a number of their SD9s in place at their facility for a bit now.
They will save some portions. They scrapped an Ex-BN SD9 and saved the chopped hood and cab face which will be grafted onto an Ex-SP SD9 that they are keeping.
There’s a mid-sized scrapper in Green Bay (part of Alter Recycling) that gets about 3-8 cars per day from CN. Lots of gondola loads of ground up steel come out. They take in autos and other assorted steel as well. It appears they save the wheels (axles) and those get put on flat cars to be re-used.
Here’s a photo at Larry’s Truck and Elec, as mentioned above (which I believe is a bit SE of Columbus, OH)
McDonald, OH is a suburb of Youngstown, OH
I tried on google maps to find all these acres of cars, can’t find them, even went up and down the tracks both ways from town, still nothing.
Can you tell me where they are located?
Plug these coordinates into a mapping program: N 32.61768 W 116.46942. Might be it.
I finally figured it from a previous post, he referred to tons of cars stored by railroads and I assumed this was somewhere around Campo, I see now he was referring to the cars at the RR museum.
“Where (do) trains go to die?” Perhaps we have a question of semantics here.### If you look at a train as an engine or more than one engine coupled with or without cars displaying markers and authorized to operate on a main track, I’d say that trains actually “die” at their final terminals.### The units powering a train, and the freight cars within the train, end their respective economic lives at any of the scrap dealers mentioned above.
“Where (do) trains go to die?” And, if it became more than twelve hours late, it was “dead on schedule,” and could not move without an order giving it the authority to move.
There are places like that al over the country. Just soth of Chcago in the rough suburb of dior is NRE’s main facility. Here is a phoo of thir backot. They have plenty of old EMD power there, including an F40C, an F7, SP High hood Geep, SD45-2, and dozens of old end cab switchers and first generation geep rebuilds. They build Gensets here and rebuild and sell or lease locomotives.
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Where is this place, I remember I passed it.