Monthly Archives: September 2017
Freight Car Friday #65 – Omya Slurry Tank Cars
TILX 16265 is an example of a typical tank car in limestone (calcium carbonate) clay slurry service. This particular car is one of a 100 car series built in 2000 by Trinity Industries and leased to Omya, a major producer of industrial minerals.
Calcium carbonate, like kaolinite (also shipped as a clay slurry, but a silicate mineral with a very different chemical composition), is often used in the paper industry as a pigment and binder for high-quality glossy papers. I’ve shared photos of a couple of different tanks in kaolin service for St. Marys Paper in previous “Freight Car Friday” posts. (I’ve been checking what photos I have of the mill, or show cars in the mill interchange tracks and the tanks around the paper mill definitely bore logos of kaolin companies – Dry Branch Kaolin in the 1990s, and Thiele Kaolin in the 2000s. I’m not sure if St. Marys used calcium carbonate.)
However, the car seen above is one of a pair of cars photographed in Sault Ste. Marie in July 2015 – eight years after the mill in the Sault was permanently shut down – and headed north over the former ACR line. An educated guess as to it’s destination would be one of the paper mills on the CP line along the north shore of Lake Superior or Thunder Bay region, via Franz.
UTLX 300400 below is a similar sort of car built by 1995 by Union Tank Car, and photographed in Sault Ste. Marie in June 2000.
Wordless Wednesday #53
More Lumber Wrap Graphics
Playing around with a few more modern company wraps recently.
Edgewood Forest Products (Carrot River, SK) – 2012-Present
PDF | XLSX – Prototype
Foothills Forest Products (Grande Cache, AB) – ~2016
PDF | XLSX – Prototype
Kirkland Lake Forest Products (Kirkland Lake, ON) – ~2017
PDF | XLSX – Protoype
White River Forest Products (White River, ON) – ~2017
PDF | XLSX – Prototype
Freight Car Friday #64 – CGTX 15941
Continuing the theme of chemical tank cars on the Algoma Central is CGTX (GATX Rail Canada, formerly Canadian General Transit) 15941, one of a pair of tank cars in sodium hydroxide (also known as caustic soda) service passing northbound through Hawk Junction on train 573/571 on July 13, 2015.
A common use for sodium hydroxide is in the pulp & paper industry; the likely destination for this pair of cars is one of the pulp mills served by the Canadian Pacific along the north shore of Lake Superior, via the interchange at Franz.