Sand Hoppers

NOTE: Nashville is currently in a construction boom phase (apartments, condos, and office buildings) and there is a great demand for prefabricated concrete components so these sand hoppers are kept quite busy.

The MTH Premier Ortner 3- bay open-hopper is similar.

The MTH PREMIER Rapid Discharge Hopper is very similar to that hopper. Look up that car.

They also call it the Rapid Discharge Car. SUGGEST it to MTH.

I seen a bunch of those N&E hoppers while riding the wine train last year.

Here are some MTH modern version hoppers. Re-tooling would be required for the other hoppers. MTH will probably just stick the N&E name on these.

Laser cut plastic sheets to fit together to make the ends of the MTH Rapid Discharge car look distinct.

There's a silica sand mine in Ottawa Illinois that comes through town here twice a day but they use all covered hoppers. There's a trail of white down the tracks from leakage, something to think about if your going to model it.  It's been running for 35 years that I know of I wonder how they haven't run out of sand.

St. Charles Model Works made a sand load to fit 6465 size two-bay hoppers, so I settled for those to build a sand hopper unit train using small hoppers accumulated for quarry duty.  Can't hold a candle to the prototypical appearance of SIRT's aggregate hopper unit train, but it's a low budget solution for the less-accomplished model railroader.  Don't see the sand loads offered on the SCMW website currently, so they may require encouragement for another production run.  Two-bay hoppers are plentiful and inexpensive.  

 

THANKS to SIRT and others for the info. Did not know about the MTH hoppers - pretty close and almost a cigar!  HA!

Traction sand is hauled in covered hoppers to keep it dry. here in Northeast Pa, sand for natural gas fracking is also carried in covered hoppers. The cars that SIRT posted are also used as ballast hoppers.

"Sand hopper" - used to see those on the beach at Gulf Shores.

rail posted:

Traction sand is hauled in covered hoppers to keep it dry. here in Northeast Pa, sand for natural gas fracking is also carried in covered hoppers. The cars that SIRT posted are also used as ballast hoppers.

Raises a question.  This website does say open top hoppers are suitable for hauling sand, but how do shippers keep the sand from blowing out in transit?  Wet it periodically?  Seems wet sand would be more difficult to unload.  Slow speed, short hauls only to limit dispersion?  Restricted to certain particle sizes?

What, me worry?

Weaver's Sand Hopper in our MOW train.  Car was also offered in PRR colors.  John in Lansing, ILL

I work at a sand mine here in Wisconsin, and the hopper cars we load are the same ones used for hauling grain.

The Toronto Hamilton & Buffalo at one time hauled sand on-line in open short gondolas. The interesting thing was that there was a white line stenciled on the car about 60% of the way up the side marked "sand loading."  It was lower than one might think, as sand is pretty heavy.