60000 pounds leaking out over a distance of roughly 1100 miles.
That's about 55 pounds per mile.
60000 pounds is 96000 ounces.
1100 miles is 580800 feet
Therefore the leak would see a loss of 0.165 ounces per foot of the path.
Every 6 feet roughly you would expect one ounce to leak assuming a steady loss of material (bad assumption but play along).
Sounds a lot like a slow leak that will be hard to trace. One ounce of pellets will be slipping into the ballast pretty easy during this trip so you're looking for chemical staining on the ballast especially if it has rained, which it has more than once.
Since the rail car will have been on sidings more than once during the multi-week journey they should find accumulations along the sidings where it was parked. How ill they know where to look? Railroads know where every piece of rolling stock is located and where it can be found within the train. They should be able to narrow this to a few feet of track at each siding where it stopped.
How will they know that anything they find came from this shipment? For many years explosives have been marked at the point of production with chemical tracers allowing them to be tracked through the supply chain to the point of use. Do they do this with fertilizer? I don't know but they do it with other explosive materials so that if any of it shows up at a crime scene or an accident site they can trace it to a batch made on a date and sent into the supply chain through a specific vendor.
Using chemistry they should be able to analyze any fertilizer traces they find along the track to see whether it comes from this rail car. That's just what I think. I am not an expert though by any means, just bored.
That's about 55 pounds per mile.
60000 pounds is 96000 ounces.
1100 miles is 580800 feet
Therefore the leak would see a loss of 0.165 ounces per foot of the path.
Every 6 feet roughly you would expect one ounce to leak assuming a steady loss of material (bad assumption but play along).
Sounds a lot like a slow leak that will be hard to trace. One ounce of pellets will be slipping into the ballast pretty easy during this trip so you're looking for chemical staining on the ballast especially if it has rained, which it has more than once.
Since the rail car will have been on sidings more than once during the multi-week journey they should find accumulations along the sidings where it was parked. How ill they know where to look? Railroads know where every piece of rolling stock is located and where it can be found within the train. They should be able to narrow this to a few feet of track at each siding where it stopped.
How will they know that anything they find came from this shipment? For many years explosives have been marked at the point of production with chemical tracers allowing them to be tracked through the supply chain to the point of use. Do they do this with fertilizer? I don't know but they do it with other explosive materials so that if any of it shows up at a crime scene or an accident site they can trace it to a batch made on a date and sent into the supply chain through a specific vendor.
Using chemistry they should be able to analyze any fertilizer traces they find along the track to see whether it comes from this rail car. That's just what I think. I am not an expert though by any means, just bored.