I was going to post this to the Military RR Equipment Thread but
THERE IS NOT ONE.....so I'll post it here.
Today five military tank cars sold at Kings Bay Submarine base in GA.
I had designs on said cars and even made a recon trip over there to see them in person.
(Note to self....getting onto a nuke sub base is not easy).
Thanks to a good guy from Base Transportation named Jerry that met us (my crane guy....I told you I was serious) at the gate and took us to the cars.
When GL first put them on the site it said you could get a "hot work permit" and cut them up where they were sitting......
inside a fuel tank farm .
Needless to say that blurb disappeared from the verbage after I asked how hard it was going to be to get the permit.
They then said that the tank could be easily removed from the frame and set on a truck. From the pictures it looked like two heavy metal straps were holding it to the frame. Buyer had to provide crane (
"no GL or base loading assistance available" why did we know that).
During our inspection the crane guy (a super guy named Mike) noticed that the tank was held to the center beam of the car by
36 huge rivets (the cars were built in 1949) and since you could not cut them or burn them off this would have presented a challenge to remove them from the frame and load them on a truck. That verbage also disappeared when I provided that litte gem of info to GL.
Did I mention that the Gooberment would not move the cars with their locomotive engine under any circumstances?
Crane rental would have been around 1300 bucks a day plus fuel surcharge
When I left the base I stopped at a local scrapper since Ferro had estimated we could get 20,000 pounds of scrap off of each of them and I could keep the tanks (I had them sold for 4 grand each).
The scrapper said top dollar would have been 10.75 cents a pound neting me around ten grand for the scrap (not counting trucking it 28 miles to the scrapper from the base).
Shipping would have been around 2 grand each to get them back to my buddys farm (the buyer).
So thats $10,000.00 to get them to AL.
estimated $3,000.00 crane rental.
estimated $2,000.00 labor and expenses (Ferro and Ron were going to assist).
estimated $8,000.00 to buy them
Could not figure a way to cut the tank off the frame. No portable water jet cutter available in FL. Thought about hitting the rivets with liquid nitrogen and busting them off but I'm sure the Safety people on post would have an issue with that.
I was not going to bid over 1500 each which would have been 7500.00 plus GL fee and tax
which would have been around 8000 total (I figure in round numbers)
I'd get around $10,000.00 for the scrap and $20,000.00 for the tanks for a total of $30,000.00
Estimated cost (assuming I could get the tank off the frame) was around $23,000 which would have given me a profit of $7,000.00.
Not enough in my book especially since the Murphy factor is always there.
But here's the kicker...somebody paid around $32,400.00 for all five of them
after GL fee and tax.
To the top bidder goes the spoils......I wish them lots of luck on that.
opcorn: