Aggregates Manager Digital Magazine
Issue link: http://read.dmtmag.com/i/282830
13 AGGREGATES MANAGER April 2014 PLANT PROFILE There are two loadout systems for railcars, one for base material and one for graded material. The railroad track runs under overhead bins, and the railcars are pushed along by a locomotive. The other loadout system is used for graded material, which comes from the blending plant. "A blending tunnel runs beneath seven stockpiles," Snead explains. "Each stockpile has seven gates to flow dif- ferent amounts of material onto the con- veyor. We blend the material, run it over a wash screen, and put it into an overhead bin that has loadcells to weigh it. There are two overhead bins for the graded ma- terial, and both have gates. When one is empty, we can flip it over and dump from the other one." Unlike the manned loco- motive at the base loadout, railcars loaded at the graded material loadout are pushed along by a remote-control locomotive. Originally, the quarry shipped 50 percent of its aggregate by truck and 50 percent by rail, but the local markets have been extremely good of late. The Round Rock area has been growing by leaps and bounds over the past few years. Commercial and residential development has been in high demand. Because of that, the quarry is cur- rently shipping 70 percent by truck and only 30 percent by rail. Just 5 percent of the quarry's business is with the highway department. The other 95 percent is with private development. Community relations Every aggregate operation knows it's help- ful to have a running good relationship with the surrounding community and neighbors. "Ideally, you would put a quarry into an un- developed area, if you can, but people tend to move around the quarry," says Kent Snead, executive vice president, purchasing. "Our goal is to co-exist in a com- fortable environment with our neighbors." Some might think that, since the quarry operates two primary plants, it would create twice the negative feedback from the sur- rounding communities, but that's not the case with this quarry. Aggregate opera- tions usually work from one side of a quarry to the other or from the inside out, but Texas Crushed Stone does it a bit differently. "We've been quarrying along the perimeter of the quarry, leaving our reserves in the middle," Snead says. "That helps us maintain good neighbor relation- ships. We've found that our neighbors are a lot more concerned if you're going toward them than if you're close, but going away from them." Being a good neighbor requires some effort and pre-planning, but Texas Crushed Stone works to understand "fence line" is- sues. It's not unusual for the quarry to get special requests from the community. Ac- cording to Snead, one developer asked him to quarry near the site where he was going to build homes. That way, the quarrying in that section would be finished before the homes were ready to sell. Good borders do, indeed, make for good neighbors. AM If the scale shows that a truck is overloaded, the driver is instructed to pull over to a material handler to have part of its load removed. Loaded customer trucks proceed to the scalehouse to check their weight on the scales. If the truck's weight is good, the driver is instructed to pull under the scalehouse to receive a ticket, which is sent down a chute.