Sunday, December 02, 2007

Gypsum trains in New Brunswick

As many of you no doubt know, NB Southern has been hauling gypsum to the Westroc wallboard plant in McAdam for a few years now. The gypsum comes from the Milford plant in Nova Scotia and is brought by CN to Saint John, then to McAdam by NBSR.


Recently gypsum has been moving a different way. J.D. Irving is completing the Atlantic Wallboard plant in Saint John at the old shipyard on Courtenay Bay. The plant is a partnership with CGC Inc., a subsidiary of USG. CGC has provided some intellectual property to JDI, who will sell all the wallboard to USG for resale.

CGC is also involved in another way. They have begun loading synthetic gypsum from NB Power's Belledune power plant into rail cars at the plant for delivery to Saint John. The New Brunswick East Coast Railway takes the cars from Belledune to Moncton, where CN brings them to Saint John. Finally, NBSR takes them to a siding behind Irving Paper where they are unloaded and the gypsum is stockpiled for Atlantic Wallboard.

The plan is to have three sets of 12? train cars to run from Belledune to Saint John. So far they have two sets running. They are using the same kind of car that the McAdam run uses, as far as I know.

Gypsum in Saint John, destined for McAdam

Other gypsum operations in the Maritimes include the Milford-Dartmouth run for National Gypsum, and the Windsor & Hantsport's short gypsum run.

National Gypsum cars through Windsor Junction, NS

2 comments:

GordyNorth said...

I saw one of these gypsum trains which passed the our train The Ocean. One thing I noticed is that under the National Gypsum logo are names; on each car that has the logo there is a different name.
Do you know what these names are? Are they employees of the company?
Thanks

Canadian Train Geek said...

Hi Gordon, yes, I believe the names are employees of the company.