By Erik Lange, Vice President of Southern Operations
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| The 109-car train sits on the rail loop at the Canton Rail Terminal. |
The 109-car train to be loaded pulled into our facility early Sunday morning
as scheduled. The on-premise loop track has room for up to 120 boxcars at a time
to carry grains farmers deliver to MKC to facilities in the Gulf Coast, Pacific
Northwest and more. After BASF left the train, it was up to MKC to coordinate
the whole train-loading process. When the empty shuttle train pulls into MKC’s
rail loop, the locomotive is left there with the train.
Seven MKC
employees and three employees from the Kansas Grain Inspection Service (KGIS)
met onsite at 6 a.m. and held a 15-minute safety meeting to go over the plans
for the day. After the safety meeting the group was out of the office on the
chilly morning and undertook the first task of sealing the bottom hoppers of
the 109 rail cars in our shuttle.
Because we want to guarantee the quality of our product and avoid losses
of the grain in route to its final destination, we used numbered zip tie style
seals and secured each hopper from tampering.
Each car has three hoppers so we used three seals on the bottom of each
car.
After just under an
hour of sealing the bottoms of the cars, we maneuvered the train into position
for loading the first car. At approximately
8:15 a.m., we loaded our first draft into the first rail car. By 8:19 a.m. the
first car, roughly 4,000 bushels of grain, was loaded. This is where we hit our biggest glitch of our
inaugural shuttle load. When we went to
advance to the next car, our software program had some settings that were not
quite right. But in under five minutes
our computer software vendor had dialed into our system, changed the settings,
and we were loading our next car. After
that, we loaded 108 more cars pretty much non-stop. Just shortly after 4 p.m.
all 109 cars were completely loaded.
While this
process sounds pretty simple so far, there is a lot more going on behind the
scenes to get the cars filled. The first
part to a successful shuttle is knowing what you have where in your
elevator. As we filled the elevator with
sorghum (milo) earlier this fall, every load was carefully graded for
quality. Specifically, different
moisture and test weights were divided into different bins. Additionally, any other factors that would
result in less than a #2 sorghum was isolated into a blending bin separate from
the ordinary sorghum.
The next
step in successfully loading the shuttle was to know exactly what the end
customer is wanting. Once you know what
you have and what the customer wants, you have to figure out how to blend the
commodity out of your facility. In the
case of this specific shuttle, we had seventeen different bins of sorghum to
choose from to meet our customer’s needs.
When you are moving grain at over 60,000 bushels per hour into the rail
cars, a small misjudgment of a blend can result in a big mess in a big hurry! (For
example, if we would run grain for just one minute at the wrong blend we would
have over 1,000 bushels of grain, slightly more than a standard semi-truck load
of grain that does not meet the customer’s specification!)
During the entire
shuttle loading process, one employee is dedicated to running the elevator and adjusting
the blend to make sure the grain stays on specification. This employee is responsible for
communicating with the employees from KGIS as well. At our Canton Rail Terminal, this employee
can control the blending at one of three places through our state of the art
automation system used to control the facility - the main office, the truck
unload control area/KGIS grading room, and the rail load-out control room. This allows the employee to move throughout
the facility and do their job and other tasks throughout the entire
shuttle. Primarily, this employee works
from the truck unload control area as it makes communication with KGIS easy.
When the
employee running the blend starts the grain stream, it flows out of the bins
into a mixture of four possible grain legs elevating the grain into what is
called the top garner. If all four legs
were utilized at 100 percent, the grain could flow as quickly as 100,000 bushels
per hour into the top garner. The top
garner is roughly a 7,000 bushel bin that holds the grain until it can be
weighed in the scale. At this point, the
employee responsible for loading the cars controls the entire process. This employee sits in the rail loading
control room and through the automation system has access to the scale controls
and the elevator controls. This person also has radio communication with the person
operating the train engine and the employees opening and closing the car lids. Based upon this employee’s judgment, the
entire process starts and stops. This
person works with the person operating the locomotive and instructs them on how
far forwards or backwards to position each specific car.
As each
specific car is pulled into place, a radio frequency identification (RFID) card
on the specific rail car is read by the automation system. This RFID card identifies the rail car to the
terminal’s computer and pre-loads the net allowable weight of the specific car
into the scaling system. This allows the
operator of the loading system to not have to enter any information about the
car or the weights and saves a significant amount of time scaling the car. Once
the car is in the correct place under the load out spout, the process of weighing
six independent drafts of grain to fill the car begins.
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| Kansas Grain Inspection Service staff are onsite the duration of loading the shuttle. |
The draft
process is a very fast way of continually flowing grain into each rail car
without having to shut the grain off in the elevator. As the grain flows into the top garner bin
from the legs, a hydraulic gate separates the grain in the top garner from the
scale. When the draft starts, the
hydraulic gate opens and allows grain from the top garner to flow into the
scale at over 10,000 pounds per second.
At approximately 30,000 pounds, the hydraulic gate begins to close
automatically and once the scale has stabilized the draft is weighed. Once the weight is recorded, a gate on the
bottom of the scale opens automatically and the grain leaves the scale at over
10,000 pounds per second into the bottom garner. Next the weighing process begins again. Between the scale and the bottom garner there
is also an automatic sampler set on a timer which is evenly pulling a
representative sample at predetermined intervals. These samples are then pneumatically conveyed
to the KGIS lab for official grading.
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| MKC employee John Gagebein and Tracy Spencer oversee the loading of milo atop of the cars fastened to safety equipment |
The bottom
garner is the last step before the grain leaves the elevator through the rail
loading spout into the rail car. The
bottom garner can hold two drafts. If
two drafts are in the bottom garner, the automation system will weigh a third
draft and hold it until the bottom garner has enough room to hold the next
draft. If for some reason the car cannot
be loaded for some time, there are sensors in the top garner that will
automatically shut grown flow from the elevator off if a certain level is
reached. The elevator operator and the
rail loader operator can both slow down or shut of the grain flow manually
using the automation system.
At the
bottom of the bottom garner is one last hydraulic gate manually controlled by
the rail loader operator and can be opened or closed at any time to evenly fill
the car as it is pulled through by the locomotive. If all goes right, this process takes three
to four minutes. In those three to four
minutes, 4,000 bushels of grain or about 224,000 pounds of grain has been moved
from the elevator onto a rail car!
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| Gagebein closes the lids and attachees seals to provide security for the cars being shipped. |
As each independent
car is pulled through, a MKC employee opens the lids of the cars as they
approach the load out spout. On the back
side of the load out spout is a second employee closing the lids and
attaching another three seals to provide security to the grain that has been
loaded. These two jobs are probably the
most physically challenging as well as the most dangerous in the whole
operation. Both of these employees are
tied off from above to the fall protection equipment to protect them from
falling off the railcars. These jobs are
made more challenging as the train typically does not stop moving throughout
the loading process so they are often working from a surface that starts and
stops continuously.
The last employee on
the crew is the locomotive operator.
This person has a critically important job of listening closely to
commands from the rail loader operator and the rest of the crew to steadily
move the locomotive while at the same time not being able to see what is
happening at almost a mile behind them.
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| MKC employee, Emily Jackson, was the conductor for the inaugural load of grain shipped at our rail terminal in Canton. |
When the
team was all done loading the train, we parked the train as delivered and the
railroad picked it up as they are able. Completed,
While our
first shuttle loading experience at MKC went very smooth and was completed in a
very reasonable amount of time, there is always room for improvement. Our goal is to make some small, easily
controlled changes on the next shuttle, measure the effects, and then either
adopt them or try additional changes with the final goal of any changes
resulting in improving employee safety, improving employee efficiency, improving
shuttle load time and providing additional profitability to our customer
owners. The Canton Rail Terminal will continue to open up great opportunities
and possibilities for MKC and our customers.
