lvrr325 wrote:Standby might not require much coal at all. But it's harder to bring it in, unload it, etc. when it's cold out. Will be interesting to see how that shakes out.
You are absolutely correct on that. Right now there is no coal on site.
The plan is to maintain the boilers in a configuration that would allow the station to reach full operation within hours of a "go" directive and then operate at that level for some period of time. Seems to me that would require a fairly large reserve of coal on site to run until shipments could be received (and I do not know what those leadtimes would be). Back in the old days during peak heating season, the station would go through 80 plus carloads every two days to give you some idea of coal usage.
Another option for supplying the station that occurred to me after my last post is that the station used to have a trackmobile for moving hoppers on to and off the dumper. Maybe HO-6 could drop some number of hoppers on the Dresden siding on its almost daily run to Geneva and the trackmobile could pull them into the station. Don't know if work rules would permit this, however. And I'm not sure that HO-6 could switch the siding twice each trip, do its other work in Geneva and get back to Gang Mills within its allowable time window.
Poppyl