I stumbled upon this website and thought the photos were interesting.

Would make a neat unit-train to model

From the Iowa Interstate Railroad, the "Ethanol Express" is lead by six (6) GP38-2's.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Ralph_M,

The ones I have seen normally have a dead car or two between the power and the tankers. Maybe they only do that when loaded?

I see ethanol trains all the time where I live. They do have to have a couple of other freight cars between the loaded tankers and the engines, usually it's a covered hopper either empty or filled with DDG. If there is no hopper, the tankers are empty. You can also easily guess they are empty by the direction they are headed. If they are going east, they are full.


Kent in SD

Ralph,
great shot on the curve alongside the CORN field, a little mixed metaphor, eh?

the Ethanol train that runs through here, which may originate as one of the ones you see, also always has a boxcar or two in front behind the power, and one trailing the train with the EOT.

Great photos..a nicely matched locomotive consist on a matched consist train, along with the cornfield metaphor.

I'm not anti-ethanol..but when this idea of making fuel from corn was brought up a few years ago, I could not for the life of me believe that our country was gonna use a food crop to do so. Now that nearly 30% of the crop is devoted to making ethanol, food prices have shot up. It's not just the corn, if you're farming, (which I always had a love of) why not cut your wheat and grain crops a little, grow more corn and get in on the ethanol boom? Makes sense to me. But..look what it's done to food prices..what a bunch of idiots we have in congress..but then, that's the same bunch that pandered to terrorist fears by voting to go to war with Iraq. The same bunch with an approval rating of around 11% by the American Public, the last I heard.
Note that this is not a political rant. I blame no political party. It's us, when we don't vote, or vote for a pandering politician, we are our own enemy.

Ed

shame there are oil pipelines everywhere. Otherwise we could have oil trains as well. Nice photos (might want to include website)

Thats a great couple of photos.

quote:

Originally posted by Ed Mullan:
I'm not anti-ethanol..but when this idea of making fuel from corn was brought up a few years ago, I could not for the life of me believe that our country was gonna use a food crop to do so. Now that nearly 30% of the crop is devoted to making ethanol, food prices have shot up.

This is mostly East Coast propaganda. Here's the facts. Yes, food prices are up but take a closer look. Potatoes are up more than grain intensive foods, lettuce is up, rice is up--it's ALL up! The reason is simple and doesn't take a PhD in economics to figure out. Food prices are up because DIESEL prices are up. I own a farm in Missouri and grew up on a farm. I also live in a very rural area and know what's going on. For the past year there have been some major droughts in key crop growing areas around the world such as Kansas (wheat), Argentina, and Australia. It's rare that so many of the exporters are hit with drought at the same time. To top that off, commodity speculators are taking advantage of it all and running prices up. (Exactly as they've done with oil prices.) And what do you figure the value of corn is in a box of cornflakes anyway? It's about 8 cents. There's about 8 cents of wheat in a loaf of bread.

There are still HUGE piles of corn on still on the ground around here. It's on the ground because the elevators are mostly still full. This year's crop is being planted right now, and more fallow/CRP ground is being planted. Are you aware that you can double crop wheat in the southern half of the Midwest? In the past wheat didn't bring enough $$ to bother doing that, but now that it does I planted wheat on my farm along with the corn. Finally, did you know that the food crop that has been causing all the bad press about food riots etc. is RICE? Nearly two thirds of the world population eats RICE, not corn/wheat. Rice is grown on entirely different land than are row crops--they don't compete. So why did rice and all the other grains go up in price the past couple of years? Same reason oil has. Former third world countries, especially India and China, are becomming more affluent and they are now upgrading their diets. Won't read that in the New York Times and the other lying media outlets. The question I have is why do the wealthy elites on the East Coast always seem to think the way to help the world's poor is to make American farmers poor again? These people are lying to you, flat out. The media isn't aware that lots of diesel is used at every step of farming, and that tremendous increases in its price doesn't have an effect? Of course they know it. They choose to lie to us.

Ethanol is not being used as a replacement for gasoline so much as it's being used as an additive. The big increase in demand came a couple of years ago when Congress banned the use of MTBE, and ethanol was then substitued as the oxgenate.
http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/oil_gas/petroleum/feature_ar...tbe2006/mtbe2006.pdf
I don't see grain based ethanol ever being plentiful enough to replace gasoline, but I do think that a combination of smaller cars with hybrid technology and ethanol fuel made from cellulose as a viable alternative at some point. Remember that oil itself is naturally "processed" vegetable matter. Why can't we make a fuel from the same raw material? We have the land and ag industrial base. It makes no sense to me to be sending billions of dollars every year to countries run by trouble makers like Chavez and Ahmadinajad.


Kent in SD

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Two23,

Here's a couple more





and here's the website:
http://www.rrdc.com/photo_gallery_usa.htm

With corn elevators full, corn rotting on the ground, perhaps the newly affluent countries should look at changes in their diets...one would think corn has more food value than rice.

I'm willing to believe the east coast elites, as well as the west coast bunch, are
trowing out some lame info..the windmills they are attempting to stick on every mountain back here are an example..when you scan the facts, you find these things live on taxpayer money..federal subsidy and tax grants by the locals.
All that for very, very, little electricity.

And I still say, to bring this thread back where it belongs, that first photo with those six matched locomotives is just one of the prettiest things, as far as a locomotive consist, you'll ever see!

Ed

beautiful bucolic shots!!!

Let them drink ethanol

REMINDES ME OF DELAWARE AND LACCAWANNA BUT BLACK