When you consider the size of the machinery required to tip the sun over, you’ll understand why solar energy is nothing but a pipe dream.
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Even with the existence of suitable regulations, we can be fairly certain that enforcement agencies are being de-funded and gutted under the current administration.
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https://info.heylpatterson.com/blog/bid/68979/Advantages-of-the-Rotary-Railcar-Dumper
tldr; the doors don’t always seal and coal spills on the track. Also, coal can freeze and jam the doors. Heating the coal to remove the ice is a risky move.
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My father worked for what was once called Commonwealth Edison, the electric company in Chicago, and took me on a tour of one of these facilities when I was a kid—that is to say, a long time ago. The cars were permanently coupled into what were called “unit trains,” and the couplers connecting them swivel around the axis of rotation of the car dumper. The trains stay connected all the way from the mines to the power station.
I know, who cares. But I loved anything to do with trains when I was a kid and enjoyed seeing all this a lot.
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Plus the bottoms of the railcars can be flatter, and more volume devoted to coal.
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I saw that coming. . . because, well. . . you told us it was coming.
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Yep, the mechanism to unload cars needs to replicated thousands of times if it is built into the rail-cars. If built into the unloading shed, it only needs to be built once. The cars become simple bins.
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Even so, I’ll be gobsmacked if I can see how this huge expensive piece of equipment is better than just having freaking trap doors that cost maybe $50 per car.
A unit train (100 cars) with quad-door hoppers would have 400 sets of doors. Each door and its pivoting and latchig mechanisms would cost hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars. But even more costly than the doors themselves is the time and labor involed in using them. The rotary dumper shown in the video dumped three cars in less than a minute. Bottom-dump cars can take several minutes apiece to unload, and that’s in warm weather with dry coal. In winter, large microwave and infrared heaters must be used to thaw frozen coal for bottom-dumping, and large mechanical shakers are lowered onto the cars to help knock the coal loose. Doesn’t always work, either, and as a last resort men pound the side of the car with sledgehammers. And after all that, humans still have to wrestle the doors closed. A rotary dumper can empty a unit train in about 2-3 hours, compared to several shifts for bottom dumping. Or longer, in winter.
My dad worked at a coal-fired power plant for about thirty years, and I got to witness both processes many times. Even got to press the START button on the rotary dumper a few times!
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Vacuum dust collection systems are used with the dumpers. They don’t always work the best. The one in the video was working pretty good, hardly any dust visible.
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A plywood door in your house might cost $50, a metal door that has to work with 50 tons of coal sitting on it is going to cost at least a little bit more.
To put it another way, why do none of the buckets in your shed have doors in the bottom of them?
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The ‘merry go round’ trains that used to shuttle between UK coal mines and power stations used bottom opening doors which were operated by squat little robots fixed next to the tracks which went by the name of Daleks.
One of the biggest changes in the UK in the last twenty years is that it is possible to travel huge distances by train without seeing a single coal train. In the 1980s they seemed to be everywhere, but now they and the coal-fired stations are things of the past.
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alt title:
Watch Santa delivering Trumps Christmas present.
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I went to school with a guy who used to drive tractor-trailers full of wood chips. He liked to tell the story about how they would raise the whole truck to tip out the trailer and sometimes you would still be in the drivers seat. Either lots of fun or absolutely terrifying, I’m sure.
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When I was young I worked on a railway repair track for a while. No coal cars, but lots of ore concentrate hoppers with doors on the bottom. Large rack and pinion mechanism to operate the doors, easily jammed, hard to repair…
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if it works, it works.
I expect the truck is loaded in an analogous fashion 
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I trust your evaluation.
It looks to me like the particular cars in use have doors because the bottoms are contoured to direct the contents to the center. Nice thing about this is it doesn’t care whether there are doors or not. Still works.
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