hOW TO UNLOAD A RAILROAD HOPPER CAR??

[PaulChristenson]

Found on another site...
Click on it and it will automatically scroll through all 8 of its pictures...
Slideshow of How to unload a railroad hopper car - Photobucket - Video and Image Hosting

And people wonder why we have OSHA...

[DreaminGreen]

I can't imagine what the training must be like for a thet job. I'd have to bring a couple cases of underwear . By the way here is a link to a video from the company that does it.

http://www.herzogcompanies.com/rrservices/CarTopper.wmv

[teg]

It's been posted here before... it is designed to do that... safely.

[RollTideRam]

It is amazing how the railroad does things. That is even better than the excavator unloading itself off the flatbed truck. JC

[855Idiot]

Amazing video but,

I thought the whole idea of a hopper car was to unload it's self?
isn't that what it was designed to do? Slanted sides, bottom openings...

No one gets hurt.

[ray66v]

Originally Posted by 855Idiot

Amazing video but,

I thought the whole idea of a hopper car was to unload it's self?
isn't that what it was designed to do? Slanted sides, bottom openings...

No one gets hurt.

You need facilities to be able to dump the cars, then in many cases you have to reload the material in trucks. This is portable, and much cheaper. They have been doing this for some time, specially built equipment, specially trained operators. If it was as dangerous as it looks they would have stopped doing it by now.

[jamestaylor72]

Originally Posted by ray66v

You need facilities to be able to dump the cars, then in many cases you have to reload the material in trucks. This is portable, and much cheaper. They have been doing this for some time, specially built equipment, specially trained operators. If it was as dangerous as it looks they would have stopped doing it by now.

Up here at our Ashtabula Harbor Coal Dock,, we bring the coal trains "hopper cars" into the yard. Then they get "fed" into the "dumper". The dumper looks like a very long shed. The first part of the dumper is equipped with large heaters, for thawing purposes during winter months. At the dumping point, the cars are actually "grabbed" and flipped over. Coal is dumped. The coal then runs along a long covered conveyer belt system. It goes up and over the Ashtabula River, and is piled into HUGE piles of coal. They then load that into the Ships, and away it goes. Pretty neat operation .
Also, yes the cars are capable of bottom discharge,, but obviously, it's much faster to simply flip them.

[KeithInSpace]

There appear to be quite a few convenient additions to the tractor to allow for that type of use.

It is actually a well accepted and common practice to climb a track-and-turret excavator onto the cars to unload them in much the same manner. If you look at a stone train when it whizzes by next time, you can see that the top rims of the cars are a little mangled/deformed from the excavator driving on top of them.

That said, I don't think I have the stones to get either machines on top of those train cars. Looks like it takes some practice.

[N80]

I saw a (big) track hoe (not a TLB) sitting in a railroad car on top of a pile of gravel. I did a double take to be sure. It was unloading the gravel for repairs to the railroad. I have no idea how it got into the hopper car.

[Stimw]

I saw a tractor with tracks and a graple driving on top of cars unloading RR ties and staging them for replacement once.
Also saw old footage of building the Panama Canal and they were dumping RR cars when moving spoils from one area to another. The whole section of track rotated like a giant C.