Earlier this year in February I posted about the demolition of warehouse “H”, to clear the way for a brand new, state of the art sand unloading & storage facility on its footprint. The building has been leveled, the debris cleared away, new structural steel has arrived, and construction has begun. I stopped by the site this evening and found this interesting site. on the west side of the old Warehouse “H” foundation, right along “A” street…a small section of the RR tracks right next to the building have been removed, for this construction that you see in these pictures. What I believe is going to happen here, is that they have excavated this pit, and laid the re-rods for the concrete work that will contain a large conveyor belt assembly. After a new, larger & modern warehouse has been built & enclosed on this old building footprint, and the RR tracks will again be laid down where they once were, but this time they will carry the boxcars directly over this new pit, which will allow the dumping of sand directly from the RR cars into this pit, onto the conveyor assembly, then carry it right up and into the new warehouse.
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This is a very big improvement compared to the way this emptying of sand process has been done up until now. As shown in the image below, the cars would park a considerable ways from the warehouse, workers would drag the portable conveyor unit under each dump opening on every car….which would then carry the sand up and dump it into a waiting dump truck, and then the truck would drive to the warehouse & dump the load inside. This was a very slow, cumbersome, dusty and dirty process as the sand would blow around at every step of the way.
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