Down Whittier Way

An Alaska Railroad crew is pulling and spotting the Suburban Propane spur in Whittier yard with a pair of SD70MACs before doubling up a big 120N freight of mixed manifest and intermodal traffic off the Alaska Marine Lines (AML) barge up from Seattle that they will take north to Anchorage a little later.

Of note is the unique grey and red HWCX car in the foreground. These specialized cars were owned by Halliburton Services and were fixtures on the interline barge service for decades transporting drilling mud components to the Fairbanks areas for blending and forwarding by truck up the haul road to the North Slope oil fields.

The AAR code for this type of car is LM, which is defined as “A car equipped with one or more permanently enclosed tanks or containers, provided with one or more openings for loading and equipped for pneumatic or gravity unloading. Car is suitable for handling certain dry powder or granular commodities, and also low viscosity, non-dangerous liquid commodities.” Some of the earlier 75 ton cars have already reached their 50 year revenue service limit while others age out in 2024 so if you want to shoot these unique freight cars you need to hunt them down soon!

Whittier, Alaska
Wednesday June 21, 2017

Photo courtesy of Dave Blazejewski