Increase Your Bottom Line with Rail Scales
Non-Legal for Trade rail scales can usually be installed in as little as one day. Because most don’t require a concrete foundation or reconstruction, systems are installed at a fraction of the cost of traditional foundation scales—saving you money upfront.
Long-term Savings and Minimizing Waste
Without a railway track scale, many operations that move products in rail cars tend to underload by at least 5% to stay within safe load limits. But underloading by just 5% adds up quickly. In the span of filling 20 rail cars to 95% of the legal safe load limit, you’ll accumulate the empty, wasted space of an entire rail car. That’s like paying to ship an empty rail car (about $4,000) for every 20 cars you send down the track.
A railroad track scale helps you reduce this wasted space by checkweighing every rail car to ensure it’s packed to the safe load limit. If you are debating if the cost of a non-Legal for Trade railway track scale is in the budget, ask yourself: How many rail cars do I ship in a year? If you ship 5,000 cars annually at 95% full, you could save one million dollars in shipping costs from underloaded cars.
Avoid Overloaded and Unbalanced Fines
Overloading your rail cars, or leaving product unbalanced, can be just as costly as underloading. If just one of your overloaded rail cars is flagged, you could be looking at upwards of $10,000 in fines. You’ll also need to pay fees to have your rail car taken off the main line at the nearest rail siding and have a labor crew remove the excess material from the car.
The same fines and fees apply to unbalanced and unsafe loads. Even if your rail car is under the legal load limit, if the contents are loaded in a way that could cause the rail car to derail or present hazards, it could be removed from the line and taken to a siding until the load is redistributed to a safe level.
Verify Incoming Product Weights
From an inbound perspective, a non-Legal for Trade railroad track scale can verify the product you receive matches the amount you ordered. You can use that weight readout to track inventory and incorporate it into your future purchasing decisions. At just 25% of the cost of a traditional concrete foundation railway track scale, a non-Legal for Trade checkweighing rail car scale makes sense every way you look at it.
Rice Lake Solutions
Rice Lake Weighing Systems’ RailBoss® railroad track scales are built for performance you can rely on. This non-Legal for Trade railroad scale provides precision needed for checkweighing, process monitoring, filling, record keeping and maintaining safe railcar loads. RailBoss is available as a full-draft, three-channel or double-draft system. Contact a Rice Lake heavy capacity scale expert to learn more.
Regional Sales Director of Industrial Weighing Systems
2moI've also used this system as checkweigher in a level detect application. The end user loaded grain ships from rail cars and as much as you'd think that unloading belly dump rail cars with 3 or 4 compartments would be fairly straight forward, a compartment would get missed and rail car would slip through with a loaded compartment only to be caught down the line and a contractor was hired to unload the car. With the checkweigher in place, if a car rolled over the scale at a certain percentage over net weight of the car an alarm was triggered, and the car was physically checked. If a compartment was found full, they'd manually index the car back to the dump area. The ROI was 3 rail cars with one filled compartment slipping through.