plastics hauled in the covered hopdpers


railBuilderDhd

railBuilderDhd

Active Member
I wanted to know what plastics hauled in the covered hoppers is like. Do the plastics get shipped as little pellets or round little bullets of some sort. What size would these pellets be and what would the pellet colors be? Would you find these spilled on the tracks near loading or unloading points? Also has anyone found anything good to model these loads? I'm just asking cause I may have found something that may work for such a load and I wanted to know if this may work. If so I'll spend the time needed to clean it from the mess it was found in.
Dave
 
The pellets will be "natural" colored in plastic terms, which means a white-ish, translucent color. The few I've seen, and I don't know which type it was, were round, about 1/4" in diameter, very smooth and kind of slippery to the touch. They were very uniform in size and color.

The type could be almost any type of plastic, but polyethylene, polypropylene and polystyrene are the most common ones I've noticed around here per the label on the hoppers.
 
Do a quick google images search for plastic pellets for some sample pictures. They come in all sorts of colours and types. 1/4" - 3/8" would be normal. Most of the pellets my plant used looked like little cylinders. About 1/4" diameter and 3/8" long.

Our pellets came in by truck unfortunately, but they spilled those sometimes, so I'm sure some spillage would be normal for rail cars as well. Large spills would be cleaned as plastic pellets are more of an environmental problem than say spilled grain.
 
The plastics plant here spills them all the time, they pick up some of the pellets, but not all of them. There's allot mixed in with the ballast.
 
Heck Jim, if I were to clean up the pellets in the industrial area here, I could mold a dozen train cars!
 
You must log in or register to reply here.



Back
Top