We specialise in covering systems for railcars, we have a wide range suitable for bottom dump and rotary dump rail cars. Our systems provide complete product protection from water ingress and eliminate loss of product. Our systems readily allow backhaul of other matericals, e.g. ■

First things first:

What type of coal are you burning?, soft wyoming low BTU bituminous or high BTU metalurgical coal.

Are you using coal stokers to generate steam or electric power or are you using a pulverised coal plant for this?, as it will dictate all your handling requirements and ash generated by your plant or plants.

How heavy is the trackage in your facility? Is it 165 pound rail and ballast loading? Ribbon rail or jointed?

Are you using car spotters or locomotives?

All the above will predetermine flyash handling aspects.

Rail cars for bulk commodities are at a premium these days and time from sales orders for them to delivery of same take a long time as each car order is custom made by the various manufacturers.

fly and bottom ash is considered a pollution waste item due to its heavy metal content etc. and must be handled accordingly.

It all depends on the end use and available rail cars and their design.

You will need need storage silos with automatically retractable chutes-"donkey dicks" as they are referred to in the trade to reduce dust pollution.

If you expect to use the open top hopper cars that deliver coal to your facility you need to know if they are owned by your utility or not as this will have a huge bearing on the method of transfer as they will either be open top bathtub gondolas that require a rotary car dumper or belly dump cars with bottom drop doors that will require a "car hoe" and a an undercar plough take away conveyor to move the ash-you will need a lot of water to control the fugitive dust either way.

If the cars are owned by the railroad they will be moving about constantly to deliver coal to the railroads various customers as the cars are pooled

and are inspected every thousand miles of travel.

You may end up buying covered hoppers with bottom drop and pnuematic gates for transfer of material

and this poses a second set of problems as you will have to pay back haul rates to your facilities unless you know of a a customer that can have a needed product be delivered to their facilty in your covered hopper cars that will not be affected by the fly and bottom ash-very hard to do unless the cars are cleaned, washed and inspected internally every time as fly ash is corrosive and a heavy metal pollutant.

If you use open top coal hopper cars you will have to either cover them with fiberglass lids or use a coagulant like vegetable oil to seal the load.

If you expect to use pnuematic covered hopper cars or conventional covered hopper cars you will need to use silos or covered storage of some sort at either end of the process to reduce air pollution from blowing soot etc.

Is the end use for cement or transfer to a land fill?

Lastly, and I know this is a personal preference but you should activate your private message ability for the forum if you want to communicate with us as not activating it hinders us knowing if you recieved a bulletin board message or wish to contact one of us. ■

Please research Dust Stop at www.cypherltd.com which is the ideal long term proven solution that will solve your haulage problems as well as stockpile problems. It is cost effective and has multiple uses in your industry and is the most flexible solution known to date for such problems. It merely forms a strong flexible film over the minerals and is 100% Environmentally Friendly and therefore biodegradable. Its uses in all resource industries are endless.

Norm Burns

Ph: +204 489-1214

E-mail: aquarian@mts.net

Web Site: www.cypherltd.com ■

I really don't know much about this, but I would really expect you would see similar issues with rail as you would elsewhere. Assuming it's wet/or gets wet after it's generated I'd have a hard time seeing it handled in the traditional dry pellet hoppers so I'd think anything designed for dirt/clay/small rock would do fine. I'd imagine it would be fairly common equipment, but I don't know.

Joe: Guess I'm pretty much clueless here.

D&J Used Briquetter ■

I can you e-mail you pictures of a 300 cubic ft. collapsable container for bottom gravity discharge. dsowders@transconorthwest.com ■