Greetings All,
Cargill Salt Covered Hoppers
and the Quaker Oats Plant
When researching the Quaker Oats Plant in Empire City that came online in January 2025 I took a good look at the ingredients required to make their products along with the freight cars needed to transport them and learned that Salt is a key ingredient to their products. See link below for the ingredient information.
Having a nice fleet of Cargill covered hoppers already in service I set up an ongoing ebay search for a Cargill Salt Covered Hopper or two to handle the salt traffic. The search recently bore fruit with the purchase of two different types of cars from different manufacturers and sellers. Lets take a look at the prototype info and models.
Cargill Salt Prototype Information
Cargill offers a large number of food grade and other salts for industrial use. The salts that are available are food grade salt, water softener salt, pool salt, general industrial salts, Champion Choice agricultural salt, deicing solutions as well as customer based salt solutions. That's a lot of salt!!! The salt portfolio link is below.
Cargill operates a large number of salt production facilities in the U.S. including for my purposes the Watkins Glen, NY, Baltimore, MD and Pittsburgh, PA facilities. There is a link to the map below.
To move its products Cargill Plants require a lot of freight cars like covered hoppers and boxcars in the below photo.
A faded Cargill herald.
A Cargill SW900 with reporting marks CRGX.
"CRGX 402 (SW900)" by KansasScanner is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
Quaker Plant
As seen above Cargill uses lots of freight cars to move its products. Quaker also uses many freight cars at their plants to receive the materials necessary to manufacture their products and ship them to their customers.
Prototype Information for Pullman Standard
PS-CD 4750 Covered Hoppers
From Tangent Models
Pullman-Standard (“PS”) began production of the 4750 covered hopper in 1972 and was the most popular seller within its peer group with more than 56,000 cars produced (not including thousands of clones from other builders and railroads). The 4750 followed upon the successful “high hip” design of one of Pullman’s earlier designs, the 4740 covered hopper, also offered by Tangent Scale Models. When Pullman ceased production of 4750s in 1981, the amassed fleet was the largest single body covered hopper fleet from any of builder, and was arguably the most prolific productions of a singular design during any era. In other words, they were super common! It was rare to find a manifest train without a PS4750 in it.
Left to right are Pullman Standard 4427, 4750, 4740 covered hoppers
Model Information
The first purchase I made via ebay was this IHC rib side covered hopper. Unfortunately the seller chose not to protect the item from damage while in transit.
In my parts box I found a suitable replacement truck and am preparing to get the car into revenue service with metal wheelsets and body mounted Kadee #5 couplers. Additional stick on weights have also been added to the metal weight inside the car.
The styrene strip has been attached to the freight car with CA. The coupler box is attached to the styrene strip with a 2-56 screw. The Talgo mount has been clipped from the trucks. and they are attached in the usual way.
The Cargill Salt green Pullman Standard PS2CD-4750 covered hopper joins the Cargill light gray PS-4427 and the yellow PS-4740 covered hoppers.
ACF Center Flow Covered Hopper
Prototype Information
American Car & Foundry started production of the 4,600-cubic-foot-capacity Center Flow in January 1965. From the start of production through August 1971, the cars featured a single stiffener that ran horizontally along the car side. Cars built after that had parallel horizontal stiffeners near the top of the side. By the end of the production run in October 1981, more than 15,000 ACF 4600s were built. (Angela Cotay 2019 Model Railroader magazine)
The salt hoppers are on the headend of the experimental Train QE-2 (Quaker Expedited) from Selkirk thru Empire City, NY.
The QE-2 rolls thru Bedford, NY. The new hoppers have been lightly weathered to blend in with some of the weathered yellow and gray Cargill covered hoppers.
Train QE-2 rolls thru Empire City to Terminal Yard. After arriving at Terminal Yard a few additional freight cars will be added to the freight consist. The same power will be used for the trip to North Side Yard as Train EC-1.
Operational Aha Moments
Quaker is the single largest customer in Empire City that is served by the Empire Belt Railroad with a capacity of more than ten cars at the plant. Creating the Quaker Expedited Train allows for the movement of anywhere from twenty to thirty Quaker bound freight cars. That's a lot!!!
Adding the two EBRR U23Cs to the Penn Central QE-2 power pool out of Selkirk made sense to me as it bolstered the bankrupt PCs motive power fleet for this train and gets the 1:87 locomotives out of their boxes.
Running the QE-2 with maximum tonnage would definitely impact North Side Yards available car capacity in a negative way. Drawing on the above prototype Quaker and Cargill freight yard photos it occurred to me that when in operations mode the track below is rarely if ever used. Aha!!! This single track with a lot of capacity can be used as a yard track for Quaker and Gervais Pipe & Fitting!!
Working the Yard Track or Will it Work?
I measured the amount of freight cars that can be stored on the 22'' radius curve track that surrounds Quaker and Haydon Heights from this point.
The last of the Quaker traffic ended here so I didn't block the road crossing. I counted 21 cars, mostly 56' covered hoppers. Not bad!!!
This is a 2018 photo of the crossover from the Belt Line Secondary to the Belt Line Mainline which is to the lower left.
Using this 2018 photo we can imagine the HH crew pulling the entire cut of 21 cars to dig out whatever cars are needed to be placed at Quaker in whatever order they specified using the Quaker Yard track and the Belt Line main. 
A TLCX Cargill covered hopper is shoved thru Quaker while the other covered hoppers wait on the single track yard in the rear of the photo for their turn to be unloaded.
Final Thoughts & Comments
Running the dedicated QE-2 with Quaker Traffic is now even more doable with the opening of the single track yard. The Quaker Plant can choose what cars it needs and in what order they need to be placed creating an interesting switching operation for this one industry. It can be as complicated or as simple as I desire.
Freight traffic to Gervais Pipe & Fitting will handled in other Penn Central trains from Selkirk to Terminal Yard and onward to North Side Yard as usual in PC Train EC-1 or Empire Belt Train EB-3.
The Haydon Heights switch crew will be responsible for working the single track yard, moving the proper cars to the Quaker Plant and Gervais Pipe. They will also deliver the outbound freight traffic to North Side Yard. The Belt Job power which utilizes more locomotives will handle the yard work and the heavy shove moves of Quaker traffic from North Side Yard to the newly designated Quaker Yard track.
Additional Links
Thanks for reading and watching!!!
See you soon!!!
