New Coal Delivery System Drastically Reduces Coal Delivery Time at Missouri Power Plant

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Researched by Industrial Info Resources (Sugar Land, Texas). AmerenUE, a subsidiary of Ameren Corporation (Saint Louis, Missouri) has just completed the addition of the West Facing Rail Turnout coal delivery system at the 2,484-megawatt (MW) Labadie Power Station in Franklin County, Missouri. The new system will reduce man hours utilized by the 15 member of the coal gang by four hours, improving the time to process loads from two 140-car trains of low sulfur Powder River Basin coal delivered each day. This saves the company money by reducing man-hours by almost 120 hours a day, but also frees up the tracks for other Union Pacific business.

The Labadie Power Station was originally designed to utilize high sulfur Illinois coal, but as air emission rules got stricter, the plant switched to Powder River Basin coal to help meet the emission standards. The original delivery point for coal was on the east side of the plant and coal was delivered directly to the East Facing Rail Turnout. When the coal type was switched, there was additional switching that required an extra four hours per train to process. With the new West Facing the deliveries head straight into the plant again, and in addition, a third track was installed to store an extra train, if necessary.

AmerenUE used Design Nine, Incorporated (Saint Louis, Missouri) as the engineering firm. Fred Weber, Incorporated (Maryland Heights, Missouri) handled the civil prep utilizing 450,000 tons of compacted bottom ash to build the 1,200-foot rail berm. The rail tracks were installed by RailWorks Corporation (New York, New York). The project started a couple of years ago with obtaining the additional land for the project. Construction began in July 2006. Investment for the new facilities exceeds $10 million.

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