Crews move giant crane over crucial coal tracks
DUSTIN BLEIZEFFER Star-Tribune energy reporter | Posted: Friday, April 4, 2008 12:00 am
WRIGHT - The 24-hour coal train traffic out of the Powder River Basin keeps the lights burning for more than 20 percent of the nation, so the railroads rarely ever stop traffic on purpose.
Friday was one of those exceptions.
Construction and crane crews had just three hours to build a bridge across the triple-track main line near the Black Thunder mine, walk a 2.7 million-pound crane across the bridge, then disassemble the bridge - without damaging the tracks.
The task was accomplished in less than two hours Friday morning, and the railroads resumed train traffic about an hour ahead of schedule.
"This whole effort has been in the planning stages for about a year," said Randy Stemp of Lampson International, which owns and operates the Transi-Lift crane.
It was an unprecedented feat of planning and engineering in the Powder River Basin - a place regarded as the world's most sophisticated mining district. Stemp said the year's worth of planning fell on BNSF Railway, Earth Work Solutions, TIC Wyoming, Thunder Basin Coal Co. and Union Pacific.
"At the end of the day, the railroad was tickled pink. They were rolling trains at 10 o'clock, about an hour earlier than expected," Stemp said.
In terms of tonnage, the Transi-Lift is the largest crane in the world. It took 60 truckloads and nearly $500,000 to move it to Black Thunder from Cheyenne, where it had installed new components at Frontier Refinery.
But the most critical part of the move was the railroad tracks. Upwards of 80 coal trains per day travel the main line through the southern Powder River Basin. This line is responsible for the delivery of about 300 million tons of coal annually. The coal fuels power plants in 35 states.
In 2005, back-to-back derailments on the main line constrained coal deliveries from the southern Powder River Basin by nearly 20 percent and sapped utility stockpiles to dangerously low levels. The utility industry estimated the bottleneck cost $2 billion.
TIC Wyoming and Gillette-based Earth Work Solutions had the job of designing a road and bridge that could safely and quickly move the massive crane across the tracks without actually putting any load on the rails.
Earth Work Solutions project superintendent Paul Roberts said Gillette-based CE&MT Inc. took core soil samples from the rail bed for analysis, and recruited consultation from a professor at the University of Illinois about how to distribute the load.
To make the trip across the tracks, Lampson removed about 2.4 million pounds of ballast, leaving 2.7 million pounds of ballast - just enough to balance the 250-foot-long boom.
The crane is being used to lift a coal conveyor over the main rail line, over the Hilight Road, to the top of two new silos that stand about 250 feet tall. Each silo holds up to 17,500 tons of coal - the largest in the basin.
Coal trains have gradually grown longer and longer over the years as BNSF and Union Pacific improve efficiencies and design. The typical 115-car train - about 1.5 miles long - will soon grow to about 150 cars.
"Now everything is being built for 150-car trains," said Ken Miller, Thunder Basin Coal Co. project manager.
Miller explained that rail traffic between Black Thunder and the nearby Jacobs Ranch Mine is too congested to increase capacity. So the mine, which operates on the east side of the main railroad line, had to build an overland conveyor to reach new silos on the west side of the main line.
"It takes a lot of planning," Miller said. "We had our first major meeting with the railroads last August. Then we discussed all sorts of time windows needed."
All the planning paid off on Friday morning. The crossing went off without a hitch.
Energy reporter Dustin Bleizeffer can be reached at (307) 577-6069 or dustin.bleizeffer@trib.com.