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Politics : Politics of Energy

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To: Maurice Winn who wrote (32931)	7/2/2012 8:34:31 PM
From: Bilow	2 Recommendations Read Replies (1) of 86352

Hi MW; Everything you ever wanted to know about coal dust and trains: bnsf.com Their complaint is that the coal dust eventually clogs up the ballast on their tracks but that's very close to the tracks (on railroad property and therefore not an environmental concern). If coal dust were really a problem with trains, I'd think that you'd be able to see it from the air like you can see any other major environmental disaster. If you go to the BNSF website you can see where they ship coal. It seems a lot of it ships out of Washington State and Texas. Their farthest east port is Quincy as in "Coal train kills woman on tracks in Quincy" which you can find if you google quincy+washington+coal. So we go to Quincy on google-maps and look for the railroad tracks. We're in luck, we find a train. Look. Is there a coal dust problem here? I don't see it: maps.google.com When they say that 500 pounds of coal dust "can" escape from a car they are giving a worst case estimate. There's about 100 tons of coal in a car so this is losses of about 1/400 or 0.25%. This is a substantial loss. A ton of coal is about $50 so we're talking about $12 worth of coal. A unit train has around 100 or 110 cars so this could be $1200 worth of coal total lost per shipment. I would think it would pay to have a little mitigation going on. And that's what the BNSF link says they're doing. Enough said. Industry and government is taking care of the "problem". What's going on with the environmentalists is, as usual, the same old green on the outside red on the inside. They're trying to stop all industry. Doesn't matter if the industry reduces man's effect on the environment. All man's work is bad to them. -- Carl

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