Dry Bulk Plastic Hauling

you were using the tractor blower and trailer to vacuum it on? or

equipment from onsite at the transload place?

i can remember late'80s chemical leaman had some new dry bulk trailers with that vacuum? chamber on the rear, but we never used
them. (at bridgeport,nj)

we had maybe 10 older dry bulks on steady work at a place called BIDS (csx rail transload facility) over in philly. i delivered a few of those loads. plastic pellets.

 

When we loaded at BIDS in Columbus they top loaded it with their machines, but we did a lot of work for Chevron,GE Plastics, and P & G where we loaded at their facilities. Most of those were from a rail siding or out of totes. We probably had 15 regular bulk trailers for loading at Bids and 10 vac trailers for the other places. The newer vac trailers we got had 2 stinger lines on them. A long one to load the front and a short one for the rear. The ones that only had 1 stinger was a short one, with a 4" mail quick coupler on the front of it. We carried a short extension with us. We always loaded the rear of the trailer first, put the extension on and then loaded the front.

 

so just to clarify, when you were using a "vac" trailer, you were also using the frame mounted blower on the tractor to generate the vacuum in the trailer?

 

Yeah, that's what we did. We took the top of the bonnet off the blowers filter/breather. Inside was a 4" male quick coupler. On the front of the vac trailer were 2 hoses. The 3" we used for blowing the product off and and a 4" flex stainless hose that was hooked to the coupler in the bonnet. To get suction on the trailer the blower was just hooked up in reverse. Instead of blowing air out it would suck it in through the blower and the trailer. On the blower outlet side we put a small muffler with a 3" female quick coupler. Close all your valves, hook the stinger line up to the rail car then you were ready to go.

 

If you want to keep your job, you better forget all about the shovel. Plastic hauling does NOT tolerate the slightest bit of contamination. If they catch you inside with a shovel you are GONE and just wasted 45k of plastic.

 

do the trailers have to be washed after each load, and also does the company usualy bring you back empty or do you work the system back home?

 

It will depend on the customer. When we had the Chevron work they allowed us to haul 4 loads of the same type of plastic before a wash out, using dedicated trailers. Any of the other shippers, GE,Amoco, Hoest Celanese, Exxon, we washed out after each load.

 

Some of those plastic receivers are especially #####y about contamination. It only takes one small piece of trash to shut down an injection molding machine. Some places we had to blow a sample out the bottom line before unloading. Any trash at all and the load was rejected.