Cement Hopper Destinations [modern-day]


IronBeltKen

IronBeltKen

Lazy Daydreamer
Hi all,

I have a Walthers Valley Cement kit waiting to be added to my layout. Here's my situation: it'll go onto an area that's very tight on space, and I'll only have enough capacity for 5-6 covered hoppers at a time. All the prototype cement plants I've seen are huge and rival steel mills in terms of the real estate they occupy; for this reason I want to try modeling someplace on the other end of a loaded cement hopper's journey from the plant, like maybe a distribution center.

What I'd like to know is, where exactly do these cement hoppers go with their loads [other than seaports]? All of the local ready-mix facilities I've seen nowadays receive their shipments by truck, not by rail. If anybody could enlighten me on this I'd be much obliged...
 
Dang I wish *I* had one laying around. Walthers is sold out & retired. That's the one thing I HATE about Walthers.

As mtrpls said, all you "really" need is another silo complex, and some sort of truck loading system. Walther's older kit Medusa Cement is a fairly good building for such.

If you cannot if it, buy the ADM Grain elevator, and just leave off the elevator structure, and add in some sort of pressure silo system, or even a grain leg might work.
 
I use the Medusa kit for just that purpose.

Here's a view of a smaller facility in Katy, Tx (outside Houston, and yes, named for the RR). you could use the Medusa or ADM kit to model the portion I've circled. Much of the rest of the facility is simply storage and could be left out.
 
Matt - great view! Looks like exactly the type of facility I could fit in my area.

Ken - that looks like a prototype 'selectively compressed' cement plant, LOL!

Josh - Have you contacted any of these LHS's yet? I'm sure one of them still has one on the shelf...
 
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Here is a view of two cement plants near me. these plants mix the product and the concrete trucks deliver it "wet" localy
The cement powder or whatever they need to make concrete comes in by rail to the plant. then the trucks haul out the product when its ready. Also I think that the gravel and sand is is also shipped in by both truck and rail ? I see semi dump trucks with gravel dumping stone and sand in the back all the time.

Trent




http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&ie=UTF8&ll=42.247017,-87.981455&spn=0.004837,0.01133&t=h&z=17

http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&ie=UTF8&ll=42.32895,-88.025615&spn=0.00483,0.01133&t=h&z=17
 
i had/have the same delima, i just didnt think to ask. I am basically trying to model a cement concrete sand operation in my city. There is a place where there are uncovered hoppers with a bunch of sand, like at the beach. This sand is hauled down to another part of the city where there is a bunch of white cement (like the places in your arial photos). but there are also covered hoppers at the place receiving the sand. both places ship in/out via truck - the big cement mixers. never seen any gravel. im thinking the sand in location 1 is mixed with something in location 2 and that becomes the concrete..location 2 is the customer because the hoppers always come in loaded and leave empty. I always wondered where all that sand comes from. i cant see them bringing it in on trucks, enough to fill up 2-3 dozen short hoppers at a time. understanding the scope of this and general cement operations will help me model it more effectively. any thoughts are appreciated.
 
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Concrete can be made from diffrent ways and diffrent meterials.cement Gravel,sand,limestone and water. Basicly a plant gets its meteral what every way it can and is feasable. If lime stone or cement is hard to find localy it would be comon to get it delivered via rail. if gravel pits are found localy, dump trucks would bring that in.

another idea would be a concrete recycle center. an example how this works would be...an old buildings made of concrete is knocked down, loaded in to dump trucks and brought to a gravel yard. The broken concrete is put into a crusher that removes any ribar and crushes the old concrete back into gravel that can be used again for roads and bridges,builings etc.. this recycled gravel can be shipped back to concrete plants via rail or trucked out localy

as far as truckshipments
most eastern states let a 16 yard dump truck carry 72,000# that gives you about a 42,000# cargo payload. A steady flow of 10 trucks a day gives you 420,000#s of sand or gravel etc...
thats alot of meteral to be mixed. I think the plant near me has about 30 concrete trucks. if they are all working the trucks can make on avg 3-4 rounds per day. thats about 90 loads of wet concrete deliverd in a good day.
 
Brick mortar plant

Maybe the plant makes brick mortar or high strength grout wear you don’t need the crushed stone.

NYC_George
 
cement is always kept covered, it's either in the train car (a covered hopper, the short kind) or in the silo. It must be kept dry.

The things you see in open hoppers, gondolas or in big piles on the ground are either sand or gravel. Sand and gravel, depending on how the facility unloads it, can be carried in a lot of different railcars. Closed bottom gondlas need a backhoe to unload, these travel along the sides of the gon (tricky!) or are custom made with giant legs to straddle the railcar. Mapquest Missouri City, Tx near US90A to see some of these beasts. Now that's a big operation! (there's more to the right of the Katy shot, mostly storage it appears.)

Around here, the smaller facilities are limited to unloading gravel gondolas. A string of gons, a backhoe and a bunch of piles of rock and sand with a few trucks to haul it off. No silos = no cement. Just rocks and sand.

Really major operations will get sand and gravel in bottom dump hoppers, the older Oertner hoppers are very common for this. Bottom dump requires some special facilities like below-grade bays and conveyors (air or belt).

An interesting newer development is concrete recycling, these places make mostly dust....but seriously they take old concrete and crush it for reuse as the "rocks/gravel" in new concrete. What you'll likely see is a single very large pile of to-be-recycled concrete, a crusher and a pivoting conveyor to restack the crushed concrete into various piles sorted by diameter (it is sold by size). Sometimes a concrete plant will have a recycling operation as well.

A small option for cement hoppers would be a bagger, they receive cement in covered hoppers, load it into silos, then pour it into 20, 30, 40 lb (or so) bags which are then carried away on trucks usually, altho a boxcar might be used in some cases. The Medusa plant is a perfect place to start for this; it needs a truck dock and a bagging building.
 
Thanx everbody for all your feedback!

Here's what I've decided to do: I'll buy some ~4" diameter PVC pipe from my local Home Despot and cut that into 10-inch lengths for silos, then use pieces from my scrapbox to do the piping, topworks, and the side unloading shed. This should provide me with the equivalent of a Medusa kit, which is really the only thing I have space to fit. Then I can avoid breaking the shrinkwrap on the Valley Cement kit, and put it up for sale on the 'bay.
 
thanks also. that info is helpful. sorry roadslug to piggyback on your post, no pun intended..;-)
 
Airslide said:
thanks also. that info is helpful. sorry roadslug to piggyback on your post, no pun intended..;-)
Click to expand...

No need to apologize, 'slide - these threads are for everybody's benefit!


Chris, I remember that thread from a few weeks ago, I think that's an excellent layout idea! Hope you'll be able to start on it soon...
 
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lmackattack said:
Here is a view of two cement plants near me. these plants mix the product and the concrete trucks deliver it "wet" localy
The cement powder or whatever they need to make concrete comes in by rail to the plant. then the trucks haul out the product when its ready. Also I think that the gravel and sand is is also shipped in by both truck and rail ? I see semi dump trucks with gravel dumping stone and sand in the back all the time.

Trent




http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&ie=UTF8&ll=42.247017,-87.981455&spn=0.004837,0.01133&t=h&z=17

http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&ie=UTF8&ll=42.32895,-88.025615&spn=0.00483,0.01133&t=h&z=17
Click to expand...

I know this thread is a bit old but do you have any photos of this place with either the trucks or trains unloading or where they unload?

Thanks,
Dave
 
Here's a pic of an operation that now occupies the old MKT Eureka Yd in Houston. Basically there is a large pit with a trestle thru the middle of it, the engine is approaching the edge of the pit here.

Hoppers are moved across the trestle, a worker opens the hopper doors, it pours the gravel into the pit. A front loader scoops it from the pit onto a conveyor that takes it to the top of one of several large piles, probably sorted by size. this is for sand/gravel.

Sorry , I was more interested in the locomotive than the operations.....

for cement powder, the unloading is done under cover so I don't have any pics.
 
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