Roundhouse: (Satellite)
Auto Unloading: (Satellite)
Car Shop: (Satellite, I could not confirm it with a map label, but with the misc. freight cars and wheelsets nearby, I presume this is a car repair facility.)
Continuous Welded Rail Plant: (Satellite)
I thought I read that Laurel was a refueling stop for the Northern Transcon Route, but I could not find a refueling pad and big storage tanks.
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| Viral Media posted BNSF Welded Rail Plant Welded rail trains at the CWR plant in Laurel, Montana. As the very long rails are assembled the are loaded directly into the rail train. Continuous welded rail (CWR) also known as ribbon rail, has fewer seams that that require less maintenance and allow trains to travel at higher speeds. Before the invention of CWR, rail was jointed, meaning bolted together that lead to mush more maintenance. Jointed rail is primarily used today within rail yards, where trains are required to move slowly. To turn the steel sticks into CWR, the complexes operate in assembly-line fashion to weld the pieces together using a fusion welding process. Rail is manufactured by steel rail producers that send the sections to us as 80-foot “sticks.” These arrive by train on flat cars at one of BNSF’s three rail complexes: Laurel, Montana; Pueblo, Colorado; and Springfield, Missouri. Here they are offloaded and stored to be turned into sections up to 1,680-foot-long (nearly one-third of a mile) of continuous welded rail (CWR). Cranes move the rail sections to the plant where is it welded together. The completed nearly one-third of a mile long CWR segments load directly form the plant into specialized rail trains for transport. |
I thought Viral Media had scraped an obsolete webpage because steel mills such as SDI's plant in Columbia City produce and ship long rails. In fact, CSX closed a CWR plant in their Radnor Yard in Nashville, TN. But the storage piles of short rails look rather full.
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| Satellite |
And they have a lot of the special cars that are needed to haul the long rails. Thus, it appears that this CWR plant is still active.
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| Satellite |
I presume they just maintain and store the big hook here rather than use it for plant work.
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| Street View, Sep 2021 |
The cut of cars in the foreground is storing spare anchor cars. Normally, there is only one in the center of the train. The cuts of cars in the background are stored rail trains.
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| Street View, Sep 2021 |
It looks like they have a lot more rail stored over by their old roundhouse.
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| Satellite |
The railroad going North on the right side of this excerpt is labeled Great Northern.
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| 1956/58 Mossmain Quad @ 24,000 |
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