Chapter Notes: Alliance (Destination Unknown) · 12:35am Dec 3rd, 2021
It’s no Big Boy, but the cab of a locomotive makes for a comfortable ride through Nebraska.
Special thanks to AlwaysDressesInStyle for not only pre-reading, but also having been to Alliance and filling me in on where to get the best pizza there!
As Sweetsong observed, out West where land is cheap, unit trains (trains carrying all the same cargo) are often loaded in loops. Some coal loading facilities have what are called ‘flood loaders,’ which can dump a gondola’s worth of coal in seconds. I don’t know if there’s a similar thing for grain; there probably isn’t, since most grain cars have troughs along the top, rather than being open. They are apparently sometimes also used for tank cars, although I don’t know how that process works exactly.
Michigan has at least one such loop that I know of, it’s near US 131 south of Grand Rapids.
Locomotives typically have at least two doors for the crew to enter and exit, one in the front and one in the rear. Or in the case of cowl-type locomotives, they’ll be on the sides (and there’s typically one on the end, or in older locomotives, both ends). I don’t suppose I have to explain the purpose of a door. The old EMD F-units had six crew doors!
On most wide-cab locomotives (most of the modern ones) the crew typically enters through the nose door and then walks up into the cab from there. Many locomotives have nose doors which have a window in them, so you don’t bonk another crewmember who’s on the end platform, others don’t and people on the platform have to be on their toes, I guess.
Nose doors are sometimes centered, and sometimes not. In the pic above, the door has the “S” of the logo on it.
The nose of the locomotive usually contains the rudimentary bathroom and has some crew supplies in it as well. Also, I would imagine, a lot of electronics in various cabinets, but I don’t know that for a fact.
Back in the day, workers got around the tracks with handcarts, often like the ones you see in old Westerns with the pump handle two crew members work. There were also bicycles with an outrigger to engage the other wheel; both of those options were light enough you could just pick them up off the tracks when you needed to. With the internal combustion engine came both speeders—basically, railroad golf carts—and automobiles fitted with flanged wheels.
The early ones could only go on the tracks, unless you jacked up the car and put road tires on it. Nowadays, you can put drop-down rail wheels on practically anything you want and drive it on the rails.
This is useful for track inspectors, who as their name would imply, inspect the track. They can drive the truck to a road crossing, line it up with the tracks, and off they go. Interestingly, such trucks typically have to comply with both Department of Transportation rules for a motor vehicle, and Federal Railroad Administration for a rail vehicle.
You can order one here, if you’ve got the cash
I’ve only ever seen pictures of it, but apparently some people are using over-the-road semis to haul short trains, rather than buy a locomotive for that purpose. I’m not sure that’s allowed for regular trains, but apparently it’s okay for certain maintenance operations.
We all know that Alliance has lots of trains and a McDonald’s that serves hungry pegasi McRibs (well, at least they do when the McRib is back)* and they’ve also got Carhenge . . . and Sam & Louie’s Italian Restaurant sells the lasagna pizza which is, in the words of AlwaysDressesInStyle, “the unholy fusion . . . which is nature’s most perfect food.” I’m not sure if that’s still on the menu (I can’t seem to find it online, anyway); perhaps it was just too good for this world.
Today we’ve got some Johnny Cash, another one of my favorite train songs.
The L&N—or Louisville and Nashville railroad, was founded in 1850, and operated under the same name until 1982, when it was absorbed by the Seaboard Coast Line (SCL) who already owned most of its shares. SCL didn’t last much longer; they merged with the Chessie System to form CSX.
Also, since I’ve got y’all here, Jake The Army Guy reminded me that it is the season for Santa-hatted avatars, a tradition going way back . . . check his blog post for all the details!
*incidentally, for anyone wondering, Roxann is now living her dream of welding on locomotives.
Aww, she didn't get to go through North Platte and see Bailey Yard. I went that way when moving from Fort Knox to the Pacific Northwest, and made a stop to see the tower they have there that overlooks the yard. It was an interesting stop while driving through Nebraska.
I know our local coal-fired power plant (Jeffrey Energy Center) has a loop for unloading because I just looked it up on Google maps. Amazing what you find out about something that has been in our metaphorical back yard since I was young.
Thank you for writing. :)
When I went looking for it on their menu again, I was disappointed not to see it either. I've had stuffed lasagna pizza (think Chicago deep dish meets stromboli with lasagna as the filling, but the one I had there was a lasagna on top of a pizza. It was crazy...crazy delicious! I was driving to the Grand Canyon and when planning the trip I specifically planned to go to Alliance because of Carhenge. Been there, and quite literally got the t-shirt.
So yeah. I never thought having been to Alliance would come in handy.
On a side note... I've also watched a truck do this:
No pics, I was on my way to work years ago when I saw it.
Santa hat added.
Such a train loop looks like a model train starter kit :D
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Sweetsong can’t see all the places on her journey, but if she tours long enough. . . there are plenty of freight trains, all she’s got to do is find the right one.
It’s the world’s biggest rail yard . . . maybe a little too big for Sweetsong (and probably has cameras everywhere) but would be an interesting visit if she happens by. Perhaps sit on a cloud and watch them work.
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I know our local coal-fired power plant (Jeffrey Energy Center) has a loop for unloading because I just looked it up on Google maps.
I don’t know of any coal plants in Michigan that do, although I wouldn’t be surprised if there are some. The ones near where I live are being decommissioned and replaced with natural gas plants or other technologies (I think there’s one in Lansing that uses biogas or something like that) . . . most of them are also old plants, as power plants go, and were due for replacement anyway.
The loop’s the best way to do it if you have the real estate, to be honest.
I know, right?
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You’re welcome!
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I have to say, hitting Alliance on the way to the Grand Canyon is kind of out of the way . . . at least if I remember where the Grand Canyon is.
So I’m not crazy that I couldn’t find it on their menu. Shame, really, but at the same time there were a number of restaurants (and other places) I fondly remembered from college that got a new lease on life in Silver Glow’s Journal; we can always bring back the good stuff in fiction
Lasagna on top of a pizza sounds crazy, but at the same time intriguing. My Mom recently made ravioli lasagna, at least that’s what I think she said it was, and it was so good.
I’ve seen them running on the track multiple times, but I’ve never seen them get on the track in person.
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Huzzah!
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Proving there’s a prototype for everything . . .
There was an article in Model Railroader years ago about a legit real-world railroad you could model in its entirety on a four-by-eight sheet of plywood; it was a transfer railroad on a dock and had stupidly sharp turns and a warehouse with curved walls and was just stuffed with track, a building, and I think spots for horse-drawn wagons to back up to (or else early trucks).
And speaking of short prototype railroads, there was a seafood company that got around a shipping regulation by building a 200 foot long railroad so that the seafood could travel ‘by rail’ for part of its journey, thus escaping US ship regulations. It’s called the Bayside Canadian Railway, and if the courts rule in their favor, it’s likely the shortest railroad in existence.
Here’s a video of the ‘round trip’ (sound quality is terrible; turn your speakers down):
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You're remembering right, it hasn't gone anywhere. As big as it is, it would take a lot of effort to relocate the Grand Canyon. I'm not saying it's impossible, but it would be very cost-prohibitive...
I just really wanted to see Carhenge, and wanted to drive through as many states as possible (I drove into Wyoming just to get gas in Cheyenne so I could say I'd been to Wyoming). I was in Nebraska, and even though Alliance was four hours off the interstate, and even though it started downpouring right after I got off I-80, I really wanted to see Carhenge. I have no idea if I'll ever be in Nebraska again, so even if it was out of the way, I had two weeks off work, so I wasn't in a hurry.
Here is a video on how doors work:
I don’t know if there’s a similar thing for grain;
Yes and no. Loop tracks yes, flood loaders...there are a few but they aren't terribly common. United Grain in Glasgow MT has a loop track, and sidings and side tracks, along with a small locomotive. There speed loading isn't a terribly large issue but at the same time it is, either way its loading as fast as the elevators and the multiple down spouts/legs can load. I know a few of the bigger elevators and terminals try to load a car a minute, multiple cars at a time, some times just creeping the train along as they load, never stopping. Others loading a unit train is a 12 to 16 hour ordeal. And everything has to be weighed and sampled and sometimes graded as they load, and it's still a "whatever shows up, shows up" type of deal, at least on BNSF, CN, and CP up here.
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Seems legit . . .
What a great series that was. Maybe with G5 there will someday be a Doors 4.
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I’ve seen pictures of loop tracks for grain loading operations and other agricultural operations (there’s one near Grand Rapids in Michigan that I don’t know the purpose of; the facility doesn’t seem big enough to justify needing to load cars that quickly/without breaking up the train). I hadn’t considered the problem of roof hatches, something that open hoppers don’t have. Even if there was no need to sample the grain, and if all the cars in the train were the same kind of car with the same kind of hatches, you’d still have to open them before the car got to the loader and close them again after it left.
One of the elevators near me has all stub tracks. I could check the satellite maps and see what they’ve got further back from the road, but either way when they’re loading, they’d have to split up the train, shove the cars a cut at a time under the loading spouts, then move them to an outbound load track. Just saving the time of breaking up the train and then reassembling it later might be worth it, even if the individual car loading times don’t change. Well, assuming you can get the real estate cheap enough, that is. (The plant near me can’t do much since their tracks end at a state highway, and I assume that it would be very cost prohibitive to build a bridge over the tracks if they wanted to add more.)
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Most of the time it seems the door opener and closer is the low man on the totem pole. A job I'm sure I've never seen done right as I assume you aren't supposed to act like a brakeman and run on top if the cars anymore, but when you're tethered to a frame above you..why not?
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(Is it just me or do you suddenly have a habit of replying to age-old comments?)
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I’ve been catching up on ones I missed the first time around, either ‘cause they were in open tabs (that have been open a long time), or ‘cause someone else made a comment there and I saw that I’d missed one.