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Pertaining to all railroading subjects, past and present, in Pennsylvania

Moderator: bwparker1

 #159725  by bwparker1
 
Quarry owner wins bid to build rail spur

By Mike Joseph

[email protected]

PLEASANT GAP -- State College contractor Glenn O. Hawbaker Inc. is the apparent low bidder on a partially state-funded contract to build a rail spur to serve the Centre Lime and Stone quarry along state Route 26.

The spur will run along a narrow corridor between two businesses and underneath Route 26 to connect the quarry with the main line.

The prospect of a construction project on a busy highway, and then an active rail line, elicited mixed reviews from the business operators.

"This is just going to be nothing but a nightmare and a dirty mess galore," said Pat McCool, owner of a screen printing business on one side of the corridor.

Little more than 100 yards away, on the corridor's other side, Sanitary Maintenance co-owner Valerie Winter said she doesn't mind at all.

"It's my position that it's the best thing going," Winter said. "I mean, one rail car takes care of four or five trucks. It's good for traffic. After a month, you don't even notice."

Two bids were submitted for the project, which includes construction of nearly a mile of rail bed, excavation into limestone to sink the bed 30 feet below Route 26, and construction of a bridge to carry the highway over the rail line.

Hawbaker, which owns the quarry, bid $2.36 million for the construction contract, and State College contractor HRI Inc. bid $2.82 million at last Tuesday's bid opening by project sponsor SEDA-COG Joint Rail Authority. The authority is an arm of the Lewisburg-based 11-county Susquehanna Economic Development Association Council of Governments.

Construction at the site between Harrison and Witherite roads east of this Spring Township village is expected to get under way next month. Its completion will mark the end of a saga that began about a decade ago with the Hawbaker purchase and plan to renovate long-unused tracks.

Those old tracks pass through the village to connect the White Hall Quarry with the main line on the west side of Pleasant Gap. The tracks have lain dormant since the 1950s, and since then residential homes and garages have grown up in the right of way.

When Hawbaker and the rail authority, which owns most of the tracks in Centre County, announced plans in 1998 to renovate the 85-year-old tracks, residents feared for their property values. Then-state Sen. J. Doyle Corman set out to find another solution.

That solution, according to rail authority executive director Jeff Stover, was to build a rail spur outside the heart of Pleasant Gap with about $1.4 million in a state grant for land acquisition and construction, $102,000 each from the rail authority and Nittany and Bald Eagle Railroad and the rest from Hawbaker.

Stover said he was assured by the state authorities that it was OK for Hawbaker to bid on a state-funded project for the company's own Centre Lime and Stone property as long as the engineering was done by an independent company.

Hawbaker owner Daniel Hawbaker said Monday he would have preferred to make use of his original investment in the old rail line, rather than to pay the difference between the state money and costs of building a new spur.

For that reason, he said, he bid below expected costs in order to maintain control of the project.

"This is not a normal public letting project," Hawbaker said. "This is an anomaly. Our own company's interests are intertwined so deeply that you just can't separate it."

"It's an under-cost bid for us," he added. "Why would I want to pay HRI to do our project? I would have much rather done it through the corridor that we own than the way we're doing it now."

Stover said the rail spur will get some trucks off the highway that Centre Lime and Stone now uses to haul road-building rocks.

"It's basically an economic development project," he said. "We were trying to get this job done many years ago."
Last edited by bwparker1 on Wed Apr 11, 2007 4:43 am, edited 1 time in total.
 #160348  by railfandan
 
Brooks, where, exactly is this quarry? I used to work at one on Airport Road in PGap.

Dan
 #186954  by bwparker1
 
http://www.centredaily.com/mld/centredaily/13197666.htm

Construction is under way on the Whiterock Quarry track to provide a direct rail link to the quarry in Pleasant Gap.

The quarry is owned by Centre Lime and Stone and its parent company, Glenn O. Hawbaker Inc. In August, Hawbaker won the partially state-funded contract to build the rail spur with a low bid of $2.36 million.

The spur will run underneath state Route 26 to connect the quarry with the main line.

The 3,000-foot rail siding will allow quarried rock to be moved by rail rather than truck. In addition to the siding, three 1,500-foot tracks will allow for loading, unloading and storage in the quarry's new rail yard.

Rail loads will primarily be limestone aggregate for both asphalt and concrete mixes, with the maximum train length in and out of the quarry being 25 rail cars or the equivalent of 100 truckloads, according to a news release from Hawbaker......

 #383295  by bwparker1
 
Drove by the new quarry spur today, there are no tracks in the pit that runs under State Route 26, but on my way back into Pleasant Gap, I noticed above the berm that there are a bunch of ties and rails piled up, I even saw what appeared to be a switch. My guess is that the switch came from the old Corning plant, as two switches were pulled recently from there, so hopefully there will be train this summer! Someday I will pull over and walk up above the berm to get a better view of what is going on on the actual quarry side of the road.

BWP

 #383894  by pumpers
 
From old aeriel photos at mapper.acme.com (DOQ option), it looks
like there is another quarry served by rail off the same branch
from which the new spur to Whiterock QUarry is being constructed.
This other one is between Graybec and Feidler Roads on the northwest side
of College Ave.

Is this quarry still in operation and does it still get rail service?
If not, was the branch from the "mainline" just west of Pleasnt Gap
out of service (until the new Whiterock spur)?
JS

 #384539  by bwparker1
 
Adam:

To clarify, your red line should continue to run up and to the right of the page, as the terminus was the whiterock quarry itself. It is a great map though, and I think it must be what pumpers is referring to.

Cheers,
Brooks

 #384927  by pumpers
 
Adam, Brooks,

I don't know how to post pictures/maps here. But
if you go to Adam's map in the other thread, the blue line that runs
N/S more or less on the left side of the picture is the "mainline"

The red line is the abandoned (and not reactivated) line to
the Whiterock quarry.

What i am talking about is the blue line running to the top right of
the map. Keep going on this line. The new spur to the Whiterock
quarry comes south of this line to cross College Ave.

My original question was if you follow this blue line past where
the new spur comes off of it, to the end. The quarry at the end
is about 2 miles east of
Pleasant Gap, east of Route 26, between Feidler and Graybec/Airport Rds
just north of College Ave. (maps.google.com calls it Airport Rd, and
mapper.acme.com calls it Graybec rd). Both call Feidler the same name.
Garbrick rd is too far.

Brooks refers to a "Graymont" facility in one of his emails in the
other thread. maybe this is it? WHere is Graymont?

Look at the DOQ photo at acme.mapper.com
JS

 #384952  by AdamCKach
 
Image

This one? When I say "to bypass," I'm referring to Rte 26.

This is, the last I went past, still in use--or at least the hoppers near Rte 64 suggest it is. The line does not cross Rte 64, but ends where the blue line/hoppers are. (If you look at the map, though the photograph is about ten years old, you can see the hoppers where my blue line ends.) There is a large quarry across the road, but the trucks carry the loads across Rte 64 to the processing plant--which itself is massive.

When I lived in Pleasant Gap, every day or every other day the N&BE would pull loaded stone hoppers towards Bellefonte. I assume they came from this quarry.

 #385003  by bwparker1
 
The stone shuttle business that Adam is referring to is no longer. Graymont is in the process of decommissioning the kilns at the Sunnyside yard plant. These kilns were the reason that the stone shuttle existed, they ran twice daily between the Pleasant Gap Quarry and the Bellefonte kilns. The good news is that Graymont has invested heavily in a series of new, energy efficient and pollution reducing kilns at the Pleasant Gap Facility, so there should be rail service for the forseeable future given Hawbaker's and Graymont's investments. I don't know if the construction of the new kilns invloved the installation of any additional trackage inside the Graymont facility.

I had the good fortune to ride in the stone shuttle once, it was fun once, but I think would get boring after awhile, as you just sat inside the plant while Front loaders filled the hoppers with limestone.

BWP

 #385207  by bwparker1
 
While on the subject of Lime, you can review a very interesting link from the Graymont Company about their product:

What is Lime?