There are also cars that are dumped and have swivel couplers so they can be flipped over, or sometimes today a frontend loader or Bobcat is placed inside the gondola and that digs out the load. In the olden days they used a big steam shovel to dig out the dirt.
I ask because there is a sawmill with a built-in wood chips station. The only car that I've found to load wood chips from this industry is:
CB Woodchips_Gondola,<kuid:-25:30> by Auran.
Woodchips Gondola
Company: Chippies Bits Ltd
Built: 1977-81ish
Length: 14.2m
Height: 2.74m
Width: 2.9m
Capacity: 52t
Wheel Diameter: 920mm
Bogie Centres: 10.6m
My sawmill is Auarn's:
Lumber Mill,<kuid:-25:630>
When the proper cars are slowly driven under the loading chute, they automatically get loaded with wood chips, no commands given.
Certain coal mines also behave in this fashion.
I was wondering if modern RRs in American would now use an open hopper to haul wood chips from a lumber mill?
Is the Woodchips gondola supposed to be a side dump model?
I found this video of an excavator scooping out gravel from a gondola car but ths seem so primitive, why don't RR's just use hoppers? :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=To69Y2s0EnQ
This method of transferring gravel from railcar to truck looks so 4th-world-ish.
Hoppers with bottom hatches were invented for a reason: efficiency and speed.
If these were hoppers they would all be unloaded in no more than 15 minutes. A conveyor loader would then fill these dump trucks in a jiffy.
I know Lionel Trains and others have had operating gondolas that dump loads sideways.
If it has no bottom dump ... it is flipped over ... Which oftentimes results in Knuckle Pins falling out, Coupler Knuckles falling out ... and various other coupler problems that need rectifying by a car inspector ... all because a Knuckle Pin has no 0.5 ¢ Cotter Pin Key installed, or the Knuckle Pin is halfway sheared in half
Some are vaaccuummed out by a high velocity suction hose
I was wondering what "Rotating Couplers" meant. I saw this operated on the sides of black open coal hoppers with BN markings. But why would a HOPPER need rotating upside down? It as bottom discharge since it is a hopper after all.