Rail roads and their tracks.

[MossRoad]

There are several grain elevators around us that have their own locos for moving cars around. Usually, they're small. That one, and one two towns south of us are not small. Grain elevator to our west has a small one ( tried to get photos of it, but it's always around the corner). A steel scrap yard near us has a small one, too.

 

[Hay Dude]

Maybe they got it cheap since its a typical loco and never repainted/rebadged it? Could have possibly been donated or a gift ?

 

[MossRoad]

Here's a sat photo of the small yard on the SW corner of South Bend, IN. The white train cars along the blue line are living quarters for RR workers when they're doing large projects in the area. I've seen them bring it in several times over the years. They usually run PVC piping from the toilets down the line to a sewer.

The red line at the top used to have two sidings. That's one of the places I used to load Army trucks and Postal vans onto flat bed cars when I was in college. That was hard work some days. We'd get two sidings of flat cars dropped off. We'd make sure the brakes were set on the cars, then pick up steel plates by hand and set them between the cars. One end was secured with a piece of rebar through pipe on the car deck and pipes in the end of the plate. The other end floated on the next car. The plates were, as I recall, about 1/2" thick by about 16" wide and 3-4' long. We had to set all of the gaps with plates before we went to get the trucks. That part of the job was one of those 'character builders'. I don't think I could lift one of those plates up shoulder height these days. It was tough when I was in my 20's.

 

[ArlyA]

Tracks explained video. Part about ribbon rail being "welding at the factory" is wrong. Its rolled at the steel mills to proper length which I believe is 1/4 of a mile.

 

[Hay Dude]

Chicago, Ft. Wayne & Eastern Railroad – A Genesee & Wyoming Company

It amazes me that theres still enough things made in the US that a lot more rails havent been abandoned. I think your state (IN) is very fiscally responsible to help keep businesses profitable through reasonable taxation or right to work, whereas mine (PA) has it’s industrial/heavy days in its rear view mirror. Still some very impressive rail & manufacturing in PA, but seems to be declining all the time.

Locally, we are down to almost nothing here. We have one large and one small steel mill still barely hanging on-foreign owned. A couple food processing plants and the rest are very small rail customers.

I was up in the industrial part of Philly 2 weeks ago and virtually everything along the waterfront is gone except Boeing and some oil refineries

 

[MossRoad]

Location. Location. Location.

Logistics is a huge business here. We're within the magic strategic travel distance of a huge chunk of the U.S. population, both east and west.

Anyhow, don't want to travel down that topic road too far. As we go west from here there are more and more railroad tracks, all heading towards Chicago. What amazes me is that there are so many left, yet so many abandoned. About 200 yards east of that grain elevator I photographed, there's an abandoned north south line. That line goes through our property about 35 miles to the northeast.

The highway system took away a lot of the railroads' business. That started after WWII.

 

[Hay Dude]

beginning to wonder if there could be a slight revitalization in my area with the possibility of NG being shipped overseas to Europe? We have shipping terminals & ports on the DE river which dumps right into the Atlantic. Lots of RR from inland PA to these export terminals sitting unused since we dont make much of anything in MY area these days could be reopened to get NG from interior PA right to the terminals by rail?

 

[MossRoad]

beginning to wonder if there could be a slight revitalization in my area with the possibility of NG being shipped overseas to Europe? We have shipping terminals & ports on the DE river which dumps right into the Atlantic. Lots of RR from inland PA to these export terminals sitting unused since we dont make much of anything in MY area these days could be reopened to get NG from interior PA right to the terminals by rail?

Man, you don't want liquified natural gas traveling on trains. We've had that discussion before. Bad juju.

 

[Hay Dude]

Man, you don't want liquified natural gas traveling on trains. We've had that discussion before. Bad juju.

Yet it does right through my town. We even had a derailment last summer.
Pipelines always better.

 

[LouNY]

Man, you don't want liquified natural gas traveling on trains. We've had that discussion before. Bad juju.

Yea, let's use trucks instead.