NNG - Extremely light weight loads - shipping helium by rail

The hazards of shipping Helium by rail - this cartoon says it all ...



This cartoon reminded me of "playing with trains" and getting paid for it. Interesting work but not narrow gauge. During my years of involvement with the 150 - mile Hanford Plant railroad in Washington State, I would often encounter helium shipments to the nuclear reactors along the Columbia River. However I never saw one of the loaded helium cars float away. This may have been related to the fact that the helium cars weighed 122 tons empty, and carried a 1.5 ton load of helium at 3,000 psi pressure. These cars came mainly from the Cliffside Field of the Texas Panhandle and adjacent areas of Kansas and Oklahoma. There were a half dozen helium extraction plants, with the Amarillo plant served by the Rock Island and the remainder by the Santa Fe.

A Rock Island 2-8-0 switching the Amarillo helium plant



The helium cars consisted of a heavy duty frame work with extra heavy duty axles and trucks carrying an array of 30 helium cylinders. Enclosed housings at each end contained the fittings for loading and unloading the cylinders.



This scrapping operation shows the arrangement of the high pressure cylinders with the housing and end fittings removed



241 of these cars were built, and in 1966 the Excell plant in Texas alone shipped 2,300 car loads on the Santa Fe. However by the end of the century helium use had declined sharply as the main users such as the Navy blimps, nuclear facilities, NASA, and others greatly curtailed their use. The narrow gauge never hauled helium, although a helium plant was close to the narrow gauge at Navajo, New Mexico (not the Navajo west of Dulce).That plant loaded helium on the Santa Fe at Gallup so the narrow gauge never got to haul loads of 3,000 psi cylinders, which is probably just as well.