Before seeing an actual purpose driven rail service, I too would have been content with my favorite locomotives circling aimlessly around my layout with just a spur or two because railroads have them. Then I got the chance to witness a purpose driven rail service.
In the final years of my employment of a power plant for an electrical utility, they bought two 300MW Circulating Fluidized Bed boilers (CFB) that burned petcoke for fuel. The technology used limestone to clean the fuel of pollutants like sulfur dioxide emitted by the fuel that had relatively high sulfur. The limestone reacted with the SO2 and SO3 (which are gases) to form calcium sulfates. As it turned out they used huge amounts of limestone, as the "used" limestone could not remove SO2, it had to be expelled from the system and replaced with "active" limestone. Trucks were used to remove the "used" limestone to an area that soon became a "mountain" that the environment agencies insisted needed to be curtailed soon.
So, they worked on contracts for places to ship their used limestone. To make it cost effective they needed to put in a rail service. The existing rail was a spur that led into the bottom floor of one side of the turbine building which was necessary to bring large turbine/boiler parts and transformers to build the plant (also to replace the large defective parts when they failed). It also had a spur that led to a sand blasting house for cleaning large turbine parts.
To expand the track for the proposed operation, they added a parallel track to the spur to the turbine building that did not reach the turbine building and they extended the spur from the sand blasting house to the used limestone silos where trucks loaded with used limestone (the tracks were inlaid with the asphalt road. It took about a year to complete the laying of the track. They decided to use a TrackMobile as their locomotive, which was smart because it couldn't get stuck with the locomotive on the wrong side of the consist. The TrackMobile would lower its tires and drive off the track and traverse a road to again track itself at a road crossing to assume its next duty.
Operationally, one of the parallel tracks was used to keep empty covered hoppers that were delivered by a road diesel and the other parallel track was used to store the full covered hoppers, until there were enough full cars to make it cost effective to have a road diesel remove them. The TrackMobile would pick up a few empties (usually 4 to 6) and set them under the silo chutes. It may remain there moving the next hopper under the chute as one is filled. Once all of those hoppers were filled, the TrackMobile would relocate the hoppers to the track containing the other filled hopper cars. The hopper cars were rather short and looked like ACF 2-bay covered hoppers.
The funny aspects: For some reason, which I don’t know, they decided to paint the TrackMobile pink. My best guess was in honor of breast cancer month. Also, because the plant became an active rail site, all employees were required to take a rail safety course. It was at that time I became aware that “fouling a track” meant that I couldn’t be within 4 feet of the closest rail, and had nothing to do with human waste.
As a result of my experience around an actual purpose driven railroad, my modeling is now centered more on rail operation and less on train running. And my first purchase on my re-entry into model railroading was a Lionel TMCC TrackMobile.
