Cape Cod Times
Cape & Islands
Saturday, December 31, 2005
This train on track
PAUL BLACKMORE PHOTOS
Locomotive hauls mountains of debris from Cape's
Christmas celebration to plant where it's burned for
electricity
The trash train from Bay Colony Railroad
Corp. crosses the canal on its journey to
SEMASS, where the trash will be burned to
produce electricity.
A front-end loader at SEMASS piles the trash to make more room for incoming truckloads. About 20,000 tons are burned
each week to create electricity for 75,000 homes.
By CYNTHIA McCORMlCK
STAFF WRITER
The red lights of the Happy Holidays sign in Buzzards Bay radiate seasonal cheer. But as the Cape Cod trash train
rumbles past, it bears irrefutable proof that Christmas is over. The old diesel locomotive pulls 10 cars filled with
torn wrappings and cast-away ribbons, ripped gift boxes and many, many plastic bags. It's the tail end of
Christmas, the back door of Yule.
On Thursday night, the Bay Colony Railroad train - aka the trash train - trundled with almost 400 tons of trash
over the Cape Cod Canal bridge. That's 800,000 pounds of garbage, or about 66 elephants. Christmas week marks
the trash train's heaviest haul of the winter. And the most volume, too, since wrapping paper and bubble wrap take
up a lot of space.
"It's a horror show out there," laughed Greg DaLuz of BFI trash hauling. He deposited a truckload from Falmouth
at the transfer station on Otis Air Force Base on Thursday, one of two stops where the train picks up its load. A
front-end loader pushed the leavings of Upper Cape Civilization across the floor of the hangar-like transfer station
and into railroad cars waiting on the level below.
A flurry of Styrofoam packing peanuts swirled in the air. Yards of white paper decorated with little evergreens
perched on a mound like a giant shower cap. That must have covered some big present. There were a QVC box,
wine bottles - hey, don't you people in Falmouth recycle? - paper plates and a punctured basketball. A black,
plastic bag full of pine boughs. A wilted bouquet of florist flowers. A golden ripple of ribbon. A porcelain toilet.
OK, not everything was holiday-related.
Continues on Reverse
Cape Cod Times
Cape & Islands
Saturday, December 31, 2005
At the other trash transfer station on the mid-Cape, garbage trucks
working overtime had dumped similar loads of detritus. It all ended up
on the Cape Cod trash train, sort of an anti-Polar Express.
A BFI employee collects holiday trash from the side of
Woods Hole Road in Falmouth yesterday.
Just as in Chris Van Allsburg's famous Christmas story, this train also
has a conductor. But Adam Baxter of Onset didn't serve hot chocolate
and bonbons. He was too busy peering through the fog to make sure
the crossing gates and switches were working. "Try the snack bar,"
joked engineer Andrew Eldredge of Barnstable, motioning toward the
rear of the train. Plenty of paper cups of chocolate, cider and soda
back in those trash cars, discarded and spoiled.
As the train pulled into the SEMASS Resource Recovery Facility in
Rochester, the four-story structure covered with white lights made an
impressive sight in the gloom - almost like the North Pole in Van
Allsburg's book. Unlike Santa's workshop, however, it reeked of
garbage. Or, as SEMASS facility manager John Walker likes to
say, Municipal Solid Waste - MSW for short.
There was a 50-foot-high mountain of MSW already planted on the
cavernous floor of the 65-foot-high building. A front-end loader with
a 20-foot bucket, big enough to fit at least 15 roly-poly Santas, ate
away at the mountain, shoving trash onto conveyers. The belts take it
through giant hammers that shred the trash to bits before it's burned
to create steam for electricity.
One of the trash cars from the Cape is tipped over to
dump about 25 tons of debris onto the loading platform
at SEMASS.
The garbage from the Cape, the only municipal garbage that comes
in via train, must be unloaded onto the tipping floor. A specially
designed monster machine clamped onto the train car's side. As the
two-story tipping machine weights rolled down, the car and its trash
tipped up and over.
Newly deposited into a 25-foot pile, the discards of Cape life all had
the same dirty, grungy, grayish look. A bit of red foil wrapping paper
fluttered down. An old Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass album lay
shattered on the floor - ghost of a Christmas past?
Trash from Christmas celebrations is left at the Yarmouth
town dump yesterday.
But the trash at the SEMASS plant creates enough energy to power
more than 75,000 homes annually. If that's not a Christmas recycling
miracle, what is?
During the development of the SEMASS Resource Recovery Facility in southeastern Massachusetts, Energy Answers Corporation
recognized that waste collection trucks going to and from SEMASS would have a significant impact on the heavy tourist traffic across the
bridges connecting Cape Cod to the mainland.
To ensure efficient deliveries of waste from Cape Cod communities, EnergyAnswers was instrumental in designing and developing
two rail transfer stations, one to serve the municipalities in the area of Yarmouth and the other in the vicinity of Falmouth Massachusetts.
EnergyAnswers' rail transfer operation is another example of the company's commitment to recovering underutilized resources.
The rail cars used at the facilities, capable of holding 60 tons of waste, were designed by EnergyAnswers using surplus box cars which had
been taken out of service. In addition, this entire transfer operation has provided daily rail freight service to Cape Cod, helping to sustain
economic development and ensuring continued benefits of the short-line railroad in southeastern Massachusetts.