I bought a few 3/4 bay, 70-ish ton hoppers on eBay for a coal train I’m building, and I picked up one painted in yellow for Morrison-Knudsen (primarily for the coal load which, alas, only fits one other car I have… which ahs a load). I know of M-K from some locomotive rebuilds, but what would they have needed with coal hoppers?
Thx!
Aaron
Morrison-Knudsen was primarily a large construction company (think Hoover Dam), so the hoppers may have been for construction material like aggregate.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Morrison-Knudsen_ballast_hopper.jpg
http://www.rrpicturearchives.net/showPicture.aspx?id=2743364
[:)]
Bear’s picture of the M-K hopper looks to me as more of ballast car, as the discharge gates are over the rails, rather than between them.
I used to get hoppers which came with those plastic “loads”, but later opted to use “loose coal”.
This train shows some loads of loose Black Beauty sand-blasting medium…
…which gives each loaded car a weight of about 8oz.
This car is loaded with fine coke breeze (from the making of coal into coke)…
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…it’s somewhat messier than the blasting medium, and does create a “prototypical” cloud-of-dust when loading or emptying the car. A loaded car weighs-in at 5.5oz.
While loading and/or emptying loose loads can be time consuming, I much prefer it to my attempts trying to remove those one-piece plastic coal piles.
Depending on one’s point of view, a loose load of “coal” in a derailment does look somewhat more prototypical than a dislodged heap of plastic coal.
Wayne
One use would have been Interstate Highway construction. At least one company had its own C-C GEs for that!
They didn’t. They were for track ballast (rock), not coal.
They would have been leased or contracted for track construction/maintenance activities like Herzog hoppers today.