Good Springs Branch

If this plant is built it will bring additional traffic to the R&N Good Springs branch. I was told by a local official that wihout rail service thay wouldn't have selected that site.

Zionsville Firm Pitches Ethanol Plant to Schuylkill County
Pennsylvania Ag Connection - 02/22/2006

A $200 million plant to turn corn into an additive for gasoline is being proposed for Schuylkill County. Green Renewable Energy, Ethanol and Nutrition, Holding LLC of Zionsville, wants to build the ethanol plant -- among the first in the northeastern United States -- in Porter Township near the Interstate 81's Tremont exit.

MCALL.com reports that the plant would create 50 to 60 permanent technical jobs, said Jeffrey L. Dershem, Green Renewable's chief executive officer.

Schuylkill County Industrial Development Authority will hold a public information session on the proposed plant from 4 to 8 p.m. Thursday in the Joliett Fire Company, 401 Main St.

The plant would use steam from the nearby Westwood Generating Station to power the process.

Dershem said about 25 percent of the corn for the plant would come from local farmers, with the rest shipped by train from the Midwest.

Most cars can use gasoline with up to 10 percent added ethanol, and some are being built to run on a gasoline mixture that is 85 percent ethanol.

That's a bad spot to put a customer that could theoretically take multiple carloads at once. That's about halfway up the "big hill" between Tremont and Goodspring, my first trip down that hill was with the 2000 and 3 loaded coal hoppers from Summit Anthracite, as soon as we left Summit the engineer put the train into emergency and we didn't stop until we were almost into Tremont. A dormant coal ramp in the same area was recently opened back up too, not sure if the Cressona Job has to go to Goodspring any more than it used to though.

A local coal company here in the valley is supposed to purchase a modern mining machine that will really increase the output of Anthracite coal. Should that happen I would imagine some of it would be shipped by rail. It seems that the high cost of other energy is bringing back the demand. Right now they are re-processing an old coal bank in Wiconisco Twp. The only local places I know of to load rail cars are at Summit Anthracite or just outside Tremont. It could get real interesting.

There's three working ramps right now near Tremont. The Centalia/Tremont ramp on Route 125 , the Summit Anthracite ramp up near Goodspring, and another one near Donaldson (can't remember the name) that reopened about a year ago.