Plastic Manufacturing


This location was closed down, and evidently the car owner had forgotten where the two cars were at, and CSX didn't care either.

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The entire unloading area was paved, as any spills of plastic pellets are supposed to be cleaned up. There was a drain, however, so it isn't as important as say, a tank car unloading facility. There was room for two cars, and plenty of vacuum pipe connects for each car. They look to be about every fifteen to twenty feet.

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The hoses to connect the cars weren't in sight, but were probably a noncollapsible metallic hose.

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Those are the two types of connects for the vacuum pipe.

To be continued...
 
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There was the ability to operate the vacuum system from the unloading area.

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The pipes ran under the driveway, to the silos and vacuum system. It's likely that the pipes from the unloading facility went into the building first, then transferred to a positive pressure system to blow the pellets into the silos.

The building, which I didn't photograph, had an office section, a manufacturing section, and a large warehouse section. There were between five and ten doors on the loading dock for loading tractor trailers.

I don't know if any of these are offered as kits to be assembled, or if most of it will take some ingenuity to build. Perhaps having just the unloading facility on your layout, with the building being flat against the wall.

James
 
Thanks for the trip down memory lane, I use to work at a plastics plant that had a similar unloading facility. Walthers Magic Pan Bakeries can be use as a building since it's close to a plastics plant, I think they even mention it in the sheet.

As for the pipes going to the building first, it was probably because the cyclone system got fed to a surge bin first for rapid unloading.

The hoses we used were clear ribbed (with steel reinforced ring) flexible plastic, to see if there was ever a clog, the wand was used for the unloading was around 2 1/2in dia for the cars, there was never a sealed connection with the wand and valves due to airflow restriction
 



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