They said in the news on NBC a US freight company lost 60,000 lbs of ammonium nitrate this weekend with no real idea how it leaked out. The company spokesperson really didn’t know anything either. How could it just leak with nobody noticing?
Leak, or stolen?
It was in pellet form, so it was possibly transported in one of those hopper cars with discharge chutes on the bottom that they transport grain in. Perhaps one of the chute doors was stuck open.
The one in the link is rated at 54 tons, so it sounds like the entire load was lost.
The entire load of one hopper car. Not of the entire train. I’ve never seen a train with only one of those cars.
It looks like ammonium nitrate is generally stored in large metal tanks, during transport:
A correctly placed hole could allow it to to leak, slowly, over the course of many hours.
A small group of people could be paid to pretend to load it into the train, but actually not do so, while someone else picks it up and takes it somewhere else. Likewise, a group could do so for reasons of political beliefs, violent intentions, or patriotic willingness.
Usually, I’d expect something more like the former but there have been a lot of train issues in more Northern territories in the last year, so who knows.
Those are tanks for liquid Ammonium Nitrate, the artical I read states that it was in pellet form and that a gate was open.
So, 30 tons spread thinly along a thousand miles of rail, mixing in with the ballast under that track.
That’s a pretty good informal example of “just gone, man.”
Or, that’s what the thieves want you to think. *dun dun dunnnn*
I have, more than once, seen a railroad track where there’s a line of powder running along, on the ties and ballast, in between (but parallel to) the tracks, and that’s almost undoubtedly exactly what it was - a leak in one of the bottom chute doors on a hopper (or a door that wasn’t completely possible).
In this case, it’s possible that the ammonium nitrate was stolen by bad guys, but it’s also entirely possible that it just trailed out over a long stretch of railway.
Was there a broken down truck stuck on the tracks that forced the train to stop until the truck was pushed out of the way?
(Breaking Bad reference…)
Ammonium Nitrate is commonly used in fertilizers, but it was also one of the materials used to construct the truck bomb used in the Oklahoma City bombing in the mid 1990s. Let’s hope that in this case it was just a screw-up or a faulty door.
I was thinking of that Breaking Bad episode. I may need to re-watch it now.
Followed by some bad guys with vacuum cleaners and a lot of bags.
Nevermind
Not a train guy, but why such a long time to haul that load? Is it normal for cars to be on rail sidings for almost two weeks? Seems it was only a 16 hour trip.
Not sure if I’m reading the article correctly, but they seem to think it was all lost on a 30 mile siding track.
A railcar loaded with 30 tons of the chemical left Cheyenne, Wyoming, on April 12. The car was found to be empty after it arrived two weeks later at a rail stop in the Mojave Desert, according to a short incident report from the explosives firm that made the shipment.
Looks like no agreement on how it leaked.
“The railcar was sealed when it left the Cheyenne facility, and the seals were still intact when it arrived in Saltdale. The initial assessment is that a leak through the bottom gate on the railcar may have developed in transit,” the company said through a spokesperson.
A Federal Railroad Administration representative, though, says the investigation points to one of the hopper car gates not being properly closed.
The rail industry is notorious for “Eh, it’ll get there eventually, don’t bug us about when”.
Clerical error. It was never actually on the train. Somebody filled out the bill of lading wrong and the error continued down the line. Seals still being intact means nobody actually looked. I highly doubt that 30 tons of ammonium nitrate is actually missing.
yeah, me too. I know it went horribly wrong, but I cant remember exactly what happened.
Wow that’s a great point Dallas_Jones! Clerical errors don’t even need to be news. It’s too bad the story went that far.
The heist itself was a success. But a little kid witnessed it and so that one Nazi psycho guy killed him.
That’s right, I knew it was something with the Nazi dude but I had completely forgotten about the little kid showing up.
I suppose a bonus of my memory getting progressively worse is that I can rewatch all these great shows with no idea what’s going to happen. I guess there’s a sweet spot - I don’t want full dementia to kick in so that I have to keep rewinding the same episode.