MONTE LAKE, British Columbia — Vossloh North America’s Tie Technologies division has opened a new plant in Monte Lake to produced prestressed concrete ties for Canadian customers. The facility near Kamloops, B.C., uses an automated production system and can produced 100,000 to 350,000 concrete ties annually. It is directly served by a rail spur.
“Vossloh has entered into long-term contracts to supply concrete ties to Canada’s Class I railways,” Brett Urquhart, senior vice resident, Vossloh Tie Technologies, said in a press release. “Our Monte Lake plant is ideally located to provide a quality product with great logistic benefits to national, regional and industrial rail networks.”
Vossloh operates seven tie plants in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, and four in Australia.
Gerald McFarlane, why not bring asphalt into it. Its true name is asphaltic concrete. It uses no cement in it and instead relies on bitumen as the binder.
As for Anna and her questions about which is greener, concrete made with cement is. There are not only problems with the places where the ties are treated but also where the ties are laid. With concrete, when it is put down in tie form, it stays where it is put until picked up. At which time all of the tie can be recycled. When a creosoted ties is put down, the creosote can leach into the ballast and then into the groundwater. Plus if you don’t cut trees for ties, they can absorb the carbon dioxide emitted when making the cement.
Mister Cook:
Be nice to me, Sir. I already told you I have friends in Italy who are in the cement business …
The above comments are generic in nature and do not form the basis for an attorney/client relationship. They do not constitute legal advice. I am not your attorney. I’m just a housewife making matzo ball soup with lox and cream cheese bagel sandwiches …
And during the time we scanned through the more than we wanted to know about concrete, a new volcano began to blow clouds of CO2 into the stratosphere. Ms. Anna, The heartwood Oak tie will last longer than 50 years.
@AnnaHarding, until your enlightening comment on cement production, I only knew it was a liquid that solidifies. When I observed liquid cement in a mixer, I think of pancake batter. I knew it did not include the ingredients for pancakes, but, it made me hungry.
The Romans kiln-burned whatever was available: Carrera marble, Travertine, etc. to create lime. To this day one can admire their mortar joints, made from slaking the mixture of lime and sand to create “cement.” And notice the facades, Coliseum et.al. missing their facades.
Never knew how cement was made. Never thought about it actually, but I know now, and it’s pretty interesting. Thank you Ms. Harding!
Knowing what I know about how cement is made, I have to ask if this is greener than wood sleepers. I hope someone has made an analysis, and if so I also hope they are willing to share it.
The above comments are generic in nature and do not form the basis for an attorney/client relationship. They do not constitute legal advice. I am not your attorney. Find your own damn commie pinko pervo punk.
Mister McFarlane:
I am fully aware of the fact that concrete and cement are not the same thing. But my original thesis, that cement production may or may not be cleaner than the admitted mess made by chemically treating wood ties, given that the cement industry is one of the big three greenhouse gas emitters, right up there with transportation and electrical generation using coal, still is cogent.
You cannot make concrete without cement. Concrete is a polyphase material (ignoring such things as tensioning cables and rebar) consisting of a fine material usually sand, gravel (aggregate), and cement – usually Type II Portland cement, although that will vary depending on the application.
Portland cement is quite messy to make, even with the modern dry-kiln process. The older, obsolescent wet-kiln process (I have been to numerous dry-kiln sites but only one wet-kiln site) went out of style except for certain types of specialty cements. The dry-kiln process is much more energy efficient.. There are other, supposedly more environmentally friendly types of cement in the pipeline, but as of this writing Type II Portland cement is the workhorse of the industry.
To make cement you must mix a silicate material (e.g., SiO2 of some form) with a calciferous material (e.g., limestone or some such), grind the material to a fine powder – almost a flour – in a roller mill, and then burn it in a kiln a hundred or more meters long and four or five meters in diameter, turning at perhaps 10 RPM. The burn temperature is 1500C or better. Along the way you add some sweeteners, alumina, ferrous material, sometimes fly ash, perhaps some manganese, to control the properties of the resulting cement. The result coming out of the kiln is a liquid called clinker, and you let this cool, add as much gypsum as you can get away with, and grind it into the powder called cement in a ball mill … and I have three balls, all of them steel. You’re supposed to choke on your cigar with that last line (I stole them from a ball mill in Italy.).
Running a cement kiln is a high energy proposition and it produces mongo amounts of, amongst other things, carbon dioxide – it really is a polluter. But energy is also expensive, especially on this scale, so for this reason amongst others (including ensuring the final quality of the product) bulk material analyzers – million dollar machines back in the day, they must be more now – are used, and it is a measure of how much fuel is used to be told that the return on investment period for one of these beasties is measured in months.
There are three major parameters which are kept under control when making Type II Portland cement. These parameters are the lime saturation factor (LSF) which has to do with the ultimate strength of the cement (and concrete); the silicon modulus (SM); and either the alumina modulus (AM) or the iron modulus (IM). These parameters affect early strength and set time. There is a feedback loop with a multivariate PID controller taking input from the bulk material analyzer and controlling in turn the feeders which deposit material onto the belt leading into the BMA. The heart of the whole thing is a piece of very tricky non-Abelian algebra that I do not propose to try to replicate in this forum.
So that is how cement is made. We had a very fun time with a plant in Italy where the silicon source – I forget what it was, and the limestone, as both came out of the ground, had sufficient sweeteners in them that together they made a perfect cement, and the controller kept shutting off the iron and aluminum sweetener feeds. It took a chemical analysis to convince plant management that yes, the system was telling the truth and it actually was doing its job.
The smallest plant I was ever at was called “El Gigante” in Argentina, and made 76 tons an hour. The largest plant I was ever at was in China and the output was thousands of tons per hour.
I was in Mexico one time when we had a freak rainstorm – a real gully washer, it came down solid, and it warped the kiln. You don’t want to know the kind of damage a structure a hundred meters long, with two hundred tons of liquid slag at 1500C can do when it comes off the bearings and falls to the ground. Fortunately nobody was injured. I learned some new Spanish that day – stuff you won’t find in a dictionary but which nobody needs to look up.
So. You have to have cement to make concrete. Making cement is a highly polluting enterprise. Is pressure treating wood ties with creosote and whatever else they use cleaner? I cannot say, I don’t have the numbers. But it is something to think about.
And Mister Rice: You should be nice to me. I have friends in Italy who are in the cement business. Or, as Guido told Vinnie, “Vinnie. You should pay the lady.” (And he did. But that’s another story).
And as for the sarcasm. It doth roll so trippingly off the tongue (or off the fingertips), do you not think?
The above comments are generic in nature and do not form the basis for an attorney/client relationship. They do not constitute legal advice. I am not your attorney. Find your own damn air-headed bit of fluff to bring you a beer.
Anna, your sarcasm aside, you do know that concrete and cement are not the same thing…though people interchange the words casually. As per the Portland Cement Association: “Although the terms cement and concrete often are used interchangeably, cement is actually an ingredient of concrete. Concrete is a mixture of aggregates and paste. The aggregates are sand and gravel or crushed stone; the paste is water and portland cement.”
Even though cement is a component of concrete, it can also be used on it’s own as a building material, hence why you can specify cement or concrete in some applications. Ties made strictly from cement would not be as strong as ties made from concrete. In theory a concrete tie has a life span of 50 years vs 20 – 30 for a real good hardwood tie with preservatives(aka creosote).
Let’s not even bring in asphalt to the equation as that’s an entirely different subject matter…
Would one of you swaggering macho he-man types please explain to Mister Rice what the ingredients of concrete are? I wouldn’t know, you understand, things technical are beyond my pretty little head. I’m just a housewife in a small northern town, barefoot, in the kitchen, and …
The above comments are generic in nature and do not form the basis for an attorney/client relationship. They do not constitute legal advice. I am not your attorney. This is no ordinary housewife you’re dealing with.
@Anna Harding. The problem with wood sleepers is that they have to be treated with creosote to maintain a reasonable life. And these ties are not made with cement, they are made of concrete.
The advantage of reinforced concrete over wood is longer life. One of the disadvantages of wood is the treatments used as a preservative. Creosote tends to leave a mess to clean up eventually. Several old and shutdown tie plants are EPA surround sites and current plants do have ground contamination issues.
Anna as I’ve said many times I’m no great expert just well read.