Mansfield, OH: Grain Elevator Expansion and Liebherr's 1450 & 1500

(3D Satellite)

The bin on the left is a new million bushel bin that brings the elevator's capacity up to 5.2 million bushels. [AllCrane]

ALL Erection and Crane Rental posted
ALL Erection and Crane Rental, a member of the ALL Family of Companies, sent two Liebherr all-terrains to help expand grain operations for Centerra Co-Op in Mansfield, OH. Big farming requires big machinery. Read the article here: https://www.allcrane.com/Articles/big-harvest

 

AllCrane
[The 1450 is a 550 ton crane and the 1500 is a 600t crane. The conveyor is 197' long and weights 80,000 pounds. The bins are 114' high.]

CenterraCoop

Jennifer Warden, Apr 2021

The tower in the above photo is on the left side of the view below. So they built the new bin on the north side of the elevator.

Street View, Sep 2018

I saved this image to record that it does get rail service. There are 2-car and 3-car cuts of hoppers parked at the elevator. I wonder if that is incoming fertilizer because Norfolk Southern now owns these Pennsy tracks and NS would want to ship unit trains of grain. The siding capacity here doesn't look large enough to accommodate unit trains. But that is a lot of grain storage for just a feed mill. So I can't figure out if and how this elevator ships grain.

Satellite

1:56 video @ 1:17
Flying the Bridge

They have reinvented grain doors so that they can load containers with grain.

5:39 video @ 3:53

2:01 video @ 0:58
"We can elevate grain at about 40,000 bushels per hour."

The link for the above video came from this post. Since I don't know where that elevator is, I'm parking this train loading information here.

Joseph Tuch Santucci posted

Let the grain begin! The fall harvest is in full swing and this time of year has the rail industry moving considerable amounts of grain. While they move grain year round, in the fall and winter the grain movements really amp up and become as regular as rain. When I worked in Montana during the grain rush we routinely moved five or six grain trains per day. 

Here we see a modern grain elevator. The steel storage bins have replaced the old concrete towers. These elevators also use loop tracks to load. The loop is long enough to hold the largest train they load allowing the train to clear the main track. The train will fit between the loading area of the elevator and the connection to the main track. It will also allow the train to fit from the elevator loading area and the connection to the main track once the train is loaded. So essentially it’s somewhat over two train lengths. Elevators like this are designed to load hundred plus car trains at a time. In Montana we usually operated 115 car grain trains.  

At these elevators the inbound power stays on the train and is used to load the grain usually with the inbound crew if time allows. Once spotted and when loading begins, the train will pull very slowly under the spout. The train will be loaded on the move with few stops if things are working well. The loading crew will stop for a break or lunch though. 

There is a car reader just in advance of the loader that reads the tags on the cars. Each car has a tag on either side and the reader will send a signal to the car as it passes which briefly activates the tag which responds to the reader. The tag contains information about the car including the car initials and number, its light weight and its load limit. Load limit is the actual load plus the car weight. The modern grain hoppers have load limit of 286,000 pounds including car weight. Most grain hoppers weigh in the 57,000 to 60,000 pound range. There are also aluminum body cars which weigh less when empty so they can hold more product but the load limit is still 286,000. Once the tag is clear of the reader it deactivates. 

When the loading is completed the can be pulled up to the connection to the main track. When the train is released and the crew receives their paperwork, if they have the time and get the authority, they can enter the main track and depart. Since the train remained in one piece, they do not have to perform a brake test. 

The information for every rail car used in interchange service in North America is stored in a system called UMLER which is an acronym for Universal Machine Language Equipment Register. The car reader is linked to UMLER and it retrieves the information and feeds it to the computer system that loads the car. It will automatically measure the proper amount of grain to load in each car. Before there was the UMLER computer system, the information from each car would have to be manually read and entered to load the car properly. 

Older elevators do not have loops but instead have yards where the inbound empty train will be yarded into several tracks. These elevators have their own locomotives and crews to move one track at a time for loading. They too will load on the move, but it takes longer as once a cut of cars is loaded it will have to be shoved back into the track where it was yarded and then another track pulled out from the yard to load. Once the train is loaded and released, an outbound crew will be called, bring in their own engines, reassemble the train, perform a brake test and depart. 

Many of the older elevators are located in areas where there is development around them where they cannot build loop tracks to load. So this older, well established and time tested method of loading will continue on for years to come. The elevator about two miles from my home recently added capacity to their yard so they can load longer trains. This elevator has two locomotives with each one coupled to a track so as soon as one track is loaded and shoved back in the clear, the other locomotive immediately pulls another track out to load. 

In either case, once it is released and ready to depart, the train is now set to begin its journey to the customer who has purchased the grain. 

The engineer in this photo was mugging it up for the camera which is not a bad thing.

Frank Koch: The railcar owners charge by time. Fast loading has a great savings. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPfkGiGEhpI