Lehigh Cement in Union Bridge Maryland recieved Cement by Railcar via the Maryland Midland.
I THINK it was National out in Martinsburg WVa and Coplay in Lime Kiln that produced the Cement for Lehigh.
Trucking was a max 250 mile radius from Union Bridge to feed a Ready Mix plant. I think I recall one in Arlington Va that had 5 silos, 6 of us would be preloaded the day before and race to Arlington to offload and about an hour later race back to Lime Kiln or Union Bridge to get more cement. This would go on for the day... sunrise to sunset until the ready mix plant says enough is enough, stop. And then we race to pre load for tomorrow's delivery.
Sometimes we got Cement out of Grace in South Baltimore by Curtis bay off a Ship next to the Canton Railroad that I think also delivered chemicals and Cement. Also in Baltimore we would deliver to a Lehigh silo for export by ship or transload onto other trucks.
A cement plant that makes cement would recieve Balls for thier Ball Mills for grinding before firing the stuff.
In Arkansas down by Hope we would get Cement delivered only by railcar. They would vibrate the stuff down the chute and up onto the big silo above the scale and we would weight out a tanker load of cement and off to the Ready Mix plant. I recall putting away 400-600 miles per day with a day cab... 9-14 hour days running back and forth feeding two or three of a company's ready mix in the area.
Once in awhile we dart into a coal fired power plant to dip a load of fly ash and truck it back to feed the ready mix.
Tanker truck tares with a R model Mack and a Heil Three potter or a Butler would be about 23 to 26 thousand give or take and gross at... 77 or so but we dump it to 80K and get around the scales anyhoo. They can measure a truck load to 20 pounds. It is interesting to see the loader watch the scale meter wind up in bigger numbers towards 80,000 gross and slap the off button and watch it stop right at 80K.
It only takes 45 minutes or so to unload a tanker at 14 psi. The problems is making sure you dont plug up because you are creating massive air/mix slurry and forcing it to climb... 30 to 100 feet up a 6 inch pipe. Electric motors fired by the plant is the best. Truck turbos tend to cough and plug up when it rains or when the engine isnt developing max horse.
How does one know it's moving ok in the pipe? Watching the dust fly out of the escape valve on top of the silo is one clue. Watching your tanker rock on it's tires and airride is another clue and finally a boot on the rubber hose connection is a good way to feel the stuff moving. There is a certain behavior of that pipe when the stuff is moving properly. It winds back and forth like a snake, a very large snake.
You always had a bucket of water to douse leaks. You see a spray of cement dust fly out of a leak and you poured water onto it until it quit leaking after sealing. However you never took your eyes off that pipe and off the hose. Should something fail, people will die.
Finally but not last, every time a man goes up top of the tanker to open the hatch there is danger of finding that there is pressure in that tanker and it can throw a man a few hundred feet to his death.
Sometimes recievers like the Lehigh in Baltimore can feed 20 trucks with air sufficient to unload all of them at once. Woe unto the one lazy driver who fails to shut off his tanker when unloaded. The loss of air can threaten the entire operation. You would listen for the tanker's music. When it is unloading there is a musical hum. When it starts to whine and hollar you banged on the bottom of the pot with a rubber mallet to get the last little bit out. When the tanker is in full cry, it's empty.
If you hear a great metallic cough that increases in pitch and duration you have a very short time to close off the pot and flush the silo with air. That means your turbo is plugged or you are plugged up somewhere and the tanker literally is consipated.
Such a scenario requires the tanker to be shut down, pressure off and the hose removed along with beating on the silo pipe to dump down the several hundreds if not thousands of pounds of product to the ground to clear the plug. Concrete plants really weally get angry. If you are in rain and dont clear it, it's turns into a solid mass and probably needs a total replacement of rubber hose and everything else involved in the unloading.
By the way... they bill down to the pound... it better be empty. Once I had a check valve fail during unloading and the cement fell down the silo, punched the tanker and blew into the turbo. Made for lots of drama and dragging 20 something thousand pounds back to the shop to replace the piping and valves that were destroyed. That was the one time I was forced to dump the tanker pressure and let the chips fall on that plant for the day. The enormous HISS of 15 PSI air escaping out of the 2 inch bleed off is very dangerous and will destroy a human being on teh right side of that tanker. Oh yes, they did yell and scream but in the end that plant got thier cement. But lost many manhours of work and lost profits to local contractors waiting on the concrete that was badly needed.
The cement also went to Hagerstown to feed a concrete pipe culvert maker. Thier silos were way up top above the production room and much much much smaller than the tanker you are unloading. It takes a bit of eye, some WAG and a dallop of gumption to move just this much cement and not over fill that silo.
I recall Gypsum in flat bedding, those got covered wagons and tarped to the Nth degree. The Dry wall I think was one material that recieved good treatment. Flyash traveled in closed tankers because I think it is considered a pollutant believe it or not.. Power plants would dump the ash into a designated field every day, what they cannot sell.
Finally you had Mortor to consider, Lime for a roofing plant and other items that would travel in the tankers. Each one behaved slightly differently during unloading.
A trucking company that provides 300-500 tankers within 200 miles of a cement plant or a cement bulk house is the company that everything in the region related to concrete depends on every day all the day. I think each of us ran 3 to 6 loads per truck per day and logged ... I reckon 50 thousand pounds at a time... million pounds a week is not unheard of.
The pay? The cement plants with Union get paid per hour large amounts of money. The hauler of the cement paid per load. The more loads you delivered the more you made. I think it ranged from 40 to 80 dollars per load. That worked out to a few hundred dollars gross per day.
Gasoline tankers are about two times that close the pay. Not bad for a high school graduate who does not go to college. I think my first pay check was 500+ dollars net and 4 paychecks later that first month close to 2000 net. I literally didnt know what to do with all of that new found wealth so... it was a good living if you can stand getting out of bed at 1 AM to get the truck rolling at 3 AM to deliver by 8 AM and work until 7 pm.
Oh one other thing. Desiel fuel. Those macks only had 80 gallon tank on one side, to maximize the payload revenue. You were either running out of the stuff, refilling or otherwise constantly betting your workday against the remaining fuel. It was best to deliver into places with the electric motors, those were the best. If you had to blow the stuff yourself off your truck engine and run out during the blow... well... you just got yourself fired.
It was better to off load that last load late in the day, and run out of fuel half way to the yard to sit for the rest of the evening dealing with that breakdown than to run dry during a pump off. Sometimes you told the dispatcher.. NO way. But gauranteed you give your tanker load to someone else and start the next work day empty and having to go get loaded before making any money.
When dispatch starts asking you how much fuel you got, you started to make a bet with yourself to get that extra load that can be really lucrative at the end of the week. Sometimes one paid a local dump truck driver to sit next to you transferring fuel with a manual pump while you offloaded so you had fuel to run. All cash and no tracking, no problem.
That was a very long time ago.
