October 15, 2015
Leo - Besides tanks, Pinto Island Metals also received gons, boxes, camp
cars and flats for scrapping. Gons the yard kept for itself and used
them until they broke their backs from all the constant loading and
unloading. At the bitter end, the completely worn out gons would be
sway backed, full of dirt and with their sides bulging far outwards.
By that time, the gons had bad trucks and they were dragged up
and down the yard trackage with one or more wheel sets jammed.
Boxes and camp cars were scrapped. Since they were all wood lined
with wood floors, such cars were lifted off their trucks by the
yard rail cranes and stacked two high. Then the night shift would soak the
interiors of the bottom cars with diesel fuel and set them on fire to burn out
the wood. The heat would set the upper cars on fire as well. You could see the
"glow" at night from a mile away, the darkness, of course, hiding the cloud
of wood smoke. A day later when the burnt out cars cooled off, they were
cut-up. Any unburned wood (such as flooring that has been soaked in salt over
the years) was crunched-up in the stationary shear.
Flats (the longer the better) were "valuable" and set aside for resale
to property owners who wanted an inexpensive bridge over creek beds or
swamps. There are vast expanses of timber property to the north of
Mobile. Logging companies loved the flat car bodies as they were just about
indestructible and could be dragged with a bull dozer from creek bed to creek
bed as logging roads were opened and closed into the tracts of timber. Many of
those flat car bodies are still being used to this day.
I also remember the yard scrapping one steam engine tender, two ship
yard rail steam cranes, a couple of wood cabooses, plus the prior mentioned Jim
Crow branch line MOW coach and the two high hood ALCO diesel switchers.
Pinto Island Metals was mainly a ship wrecking and auto shredding yard. The
railroad scrap operation was a side line, although at times an important
source of tonnage. It was very different from what it would be today
with all the restrictions and regulations you mention. Best Regards -
Louis
In a message dated 10/14/2015 8:18:39 A.M. Central Daylight Time,
CBQ@yahoogroups.com writes:
Louis,
Thanks. I'm chuckling a little bit....... All of those optional car sales
and uses you mention are pretty much forbidden today and have been for some
time. As you said earlier "taken the fun out of car scrapping". Going back at
least 25 or so years all the retired car sale contracts at my former employer
had strong language about reselling for any other use. It also specified no
culverts.
Why, because they seemed to always come back to haunt after decades. The
stories I can tell about cars found out in the weeds at abandoned plants,etc
are pretty extensive.
Today I'm on the other side of the table and it's very rare that a car
owner sells cars for dismantling w/o contractual language banning all the
fun,more profitable end uses.
The one fun part of my old job was
donating old cars to museums and for hazmat training purposes.
Leo Phillipp
< div>
On Oct 12, 2015, at 1:51 PM, LZadnichek@aol.com [CBQ] <CBQ@yahoogroups.com> wrote:
October 12,
2015
Leo - I regret taking nearly a week to answer back, but I'll make it up
to you with the attached image. Some years ago, I posted my memories of
part-owning and operating a 45-ton Baldwin logging 2-6-2 switch engine at
Pinto Island Metals Company in Mobile, AL, during the mid-1970s. The
attached image shows ex-Alger Sullivan Lumber Co. (Escambia Railroad) No.
100 being used in May 1976 as a portable boiler to "steam" tank cars full of
a mix of Bunker C fuel oil and water (slops, as we called it) that
had been pumped out of the double bottom tanks of scrapped Liberty
Ships. During winter months, the oil would congeal into a tar like
substance and the tank cars would have to be steam heated to thin the slops
to the point where they could be pumped out into a waiting
tank truck. The slops were then either sold to a local paper
company to burn in their boilers or to land owners to spread on
their dirt roads to keep the dust down (perfectly legal some 40 years ago).
For tank cars without steam coils, the yard had fabricated one out
of pipe that stuck down into the car from its opening on top. The
tank car in front was a conventional GATX car sold to Pinto Island
Metals for scrap and the one in back was rubber lined (I forget what
company had sold it to the yard). The scrap yard had at any
one time about 20 such cars to store slops in. When the cars were
eventually pumped out, then they would be switched back to the
sidings at the ship wrecking haul out ways to be loaded with more
slops. This went on for some years until Pinto Island Metals ran out of
ships to scrap and the yard closed. Eventually, the yard site was
remediated and capped with a layer of spent blasting sand. from a ship yard.
Today, a steel import terminal sits atop the site on a huge concrete
pad.
Getting back to your question on how we scrapped tank cars, here
is what I recollect some 40 years later. As I said earlier, we didn't want
rubber lined cars and only accepted them at no value. But, since
they still showed-up at the front gate (there were many major chemical
plants and paper mills in the Mobile area that used such tank cars), rubber
lined cars usually ended-up being used for slop storage. Or, we sold
the tanks to industries for storing liquids and scrapped the frame and
trucks. When more such cars arrived than could be used for slops, the
tanks were filled with water to the brim. Then, a skilled burner
would cut against the water and burn out large holes in each end to
ventilate the tanks. Following, railroad ties, drift wood, trash,
whatever was placed in the tanks and set on fire to burn as much as possible
of the rubber lining out of the tank. When the tanks cooled down, then
they would be cut-up. Hand torches fed by underground gas lines were used to
cut scrap steel into panels that would be fed by magnet cranes into a large
hydraulic stationary shear that would further reduce the scrap to
sellable size. This was long before tracked hydraulic cutters as you
commonly see moving around in scrap yards today. Pinto Island
Metals exported almost all of their prepared scrap overseas and we had
a long pier out into the river where ships would tie-up to be loaded
with a gantry crane. Scrap in that era was sold to Mexico, Turkey and
Europe.
As for conventional non-lined tank cars, in the rare event when
cars arrived that had been steam cleaned, we first had a marine chemist
"sniff" the tanks for hazardous fumes. If the tanks were free of fumes
and the chemist certified them as being safe to cut, then burners would
cut them up. If the chemist found fumes, then they were filled to the brim
with water and had their ends cut out first. Then, ventilated, they would be
cut-up. The yard also occasionally sold cleaned tanks to
industries and they brought a premium price. Property owners
additionally purchased other cars with their ends cut out to use as
road culverts. In rare events, some tanks cars with a little bit of
life still left in them were sold to Mobile area industries to be used
in non-interchange business within their plants. Some of those cars are,
believe it or not, still in existence. One small area private tank car
line also would be in the market for "small" clean tanks cars that could
still be interchanged for use in transporting naval stores. As for
what happened to all the untold thousands of gallons of water that drained
out of the tank cars that were cut up, well it all went onto the ground
and it made for a muddy mess at times to walk around in the scrap yard.
Smoke, dust, mud and noise, that was life in a scrap yard in those long gone
days. Best Regards -
Louis
Louis,
Here's the Pielet story as related to me by a
former employee. They had an operation at Joliet that supplied scrap to
USS nearby. After the AAR banned riveted tanks from interchange
service
(I believe it was very early 1970s) they started flowing into
the yard in large numbers. The torch cutters could not keep up. One
employee had been a demolitions man during the war. So he volunteered to
speed up the processing. He was sure he could put just the right amount of
dynamite in a tank to blow out the rivets and then the cutters could work
on the plates on the ground.
Well..... He not only managed to blow
out the rivets but he also sent them flying all over the adjacent
neighborhood into buildings and houses !
As a side story, the Q/BN
kept the 181000 series 16,000 gallon riveted tanks in service beyond the
AAR deadline as they were kept online in fuel service. One night were were
pulling a string of them out of Standard Oils pipeline terminal at
Rochelle. I noticed one of them leaking at a rivet. We were told to set it
back in. It sat there for a couple days leaking away.
Rubber
linings:
Removing rubber linings from tank cars is expensive but
necessary as usually about 10-12 years is the maximum life span. A few go
longer,but very few. In recent decades removal is done by water blasting
or a specialized form of scraping it off the tank shell. Back in the day
it was accomplished much simpler.
The rubber linings need periodic
inspections to insure they are still viable. At my former job shops
started sending me lining and tank inspection reports with cars that had
sagging top center tanks. So I would talk with the inspectors and ask if
there was impact damage at the strikers as usually a buckled tank was
caused by excessive coupling force. But in some cases they advised there
was no striker or end of car indications of overspeed coupling. So what's
causing the top center of the tank shells to sag ?
That's when I
learned that,like your oil and rubber lined scrapping method, at least
some pre EPA
shops had an easy way to remove a lining. Near dusk an
employee would climb up the car and drop a few oil soaked journal pads
into the car. Start them on fire and go home. Next morning the cars rubber
lining had been "Removed" and car was ready for a relining. Years later
the heat damage to the tank shell would appear as a sagging tank shell
that required a major and expensive tank shell insert.
Just as a
point of clarification to readers who aren't familiar with today's rail
car scrapping requirements. Today and for a long time all cars must be
cleaned. Most scrap yards will not accept a car w/o a certified cleaning
certificate. While torching still goes on, most cars are sheared by mobile
or stationary shears. Some are even cut in large sections and sent through
an automobile shredder. All scrap yards are heavily monitored by state and
federal EPAs and must meet intensive air and water runoff requirements. As
Louis mentioned they took all the fun out of car cutting. Even the
occasional wood floor from a box car must be removed and land filled,not
burned. All the various insulation types in tank cars must be removed and
disposed.
As to rubber linings they are not burned out but
generally come into a scrap yard already removed.
If not one method I
have been told about is to keep a steady spray of water on a tank car
end(called the head) while a torch man goes around it cutting it off. Then
laborers are sent into the open car with what look like ice scrapers to
peel the lining off. By the way only a very minor percent of the tank car
fleet is rubber
lined.
Leo
------------------------------------
Posted
by: qutlx1@aol.com
------------------------------------
<Alger100PIMetalsMobileALMay1976.jpg>
__._,_.___
Posted by: LZadnichek@aol.com
![]()
__,_._,___
|