Industrial railway

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Two Sydney Coal Railway GP38-2 locomotives leave the Lingan Generating Station after unloading coal in Nova Scotia.

An industrial railway is a type of private railway used exclusively to serve a particular industrial site, either entirely within a mine or factory compound, or connecting the site to public freight networks.

Overview

Industrial railways were once very common, but with the rise of road transport, their numbers have greatly diminished. An example of an industrial railway would transport clay from a quarry to an interchange point with a main line railway, where it would be transported to its final destination. The line would be owned and operated by the quarry company, and would exist solely to serve the quarry.

Most industrial railways are short, usually being only a few kilometers long, but there are notable exceptions—examples of which include the iron ore-carrying railways in Western Australia which are hundreds of kilometers long to transport iron ore from inland to the coast. China also has long industrial railways to transport coal. In Canada there are the Quebec North Shore and Labrador Railway and the Cartier Railway.

Industrial railways serve many different industries. In both Australia and Cuba a large number of industrial railways serve the sugarcane industry. In Colorado, the Coors Brewing Company uses its own industrial railway at the brewery both for the delivery of raw materials and for shipping the finished product.

Some industrial railways serve ammunition dumps.

Gallery

An SW1500 hauls NASA equipment cars along the NASA Railroad in Cape Canaveral, Florida.

A display of a narrow gauge industrial sand train at Leighton Buzzard Narrow Gauge Railway.

An open-pit iron mining industrial railroad in Hibbing, Minnesota, circa 1906.

Steam-powered logging train in Comandău, Romania.

See also

• Short-line railroad
• British narrow gauge railways
• British industrial narrow gauge railways
• Decauville
• Light railway
• Minimum gauge railway

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Industrial railways

• The Industrial Railway Society (UK)
• Light Railway Research Society of Australia (AU)

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