Mobile lab moving from desert

STOCKTON, Tooele County — Two massive cranes on Wednesday moved a uniquely configured rail car that is one of the oldest remnants of the Army's program to destroy the nation's chemical weapons stockpile.

The rail car is headed by truck from the Deseret Chemical Depot south of Tooele to Ogden Union Station, where it will become a museum piece after sitting in Utah's western desert for almost 40 years.

The rail car first rolled onto the depot while the Army was making the transition from a practice of disposing of defective chemical weapons pieces by burning them in open pits or dumping them in the ocean to a systematic process of destroying the entire stockpile.

Army officials first envisioned a mobile laboratory that could move among the eight chemical weapons stockpile sites in the country, destroying and cleaning up chemical agents and weapons at each site and then rolling along to the next site.

"They wanted to develop the entire system so it would be on rail cars," said Dennis Grieder, a career engineer at the depot.

The massive rail car was the first to arrive at the Army depot south of Tooele. It contains two V-16 diesel engines that turn a 235-kilowatt generating unit. The car, built between 1927 and 1935, had previously been the power unit for an Air Force Mobile Medical Detachment, said depot spokeswoman Alaine Grieser.

Grieder said the Army soon realized the equipment components involved "too much equipment to make it practical to move," Grieder said. The rail car stayed, serving as a backup generator and was soon surrounded by permanent structures on concrete pads.

The growing facility around it became known as the Chemical Agent Munitions Disposal System (CAMDS) and was the research facility for all of the factory-like complexes in the Army's chemical weapons elimination program. The R&D facility is just a mile away from the Tooele Chemical Agent Disposal Facility that now is incinerating the Tooele stockpile, obligated by international treaty to have its work finished by 2012.

Maintenance worker Robert Gordon kept the 90-foot rail car's generators working and then put the system in mothballs in 1993 when the equipment was replaced with newer, more efficient generators. He said the Ogden museum plans to refurbish the generators and press the equipment into sservice again as a backup power source in addition to using the car as an exhibit.

Gordon describes himself as an "armchair railroader" and initiated the paperwork to have the car added to the National Register of Historic Places, a designation that will follow the car to the museum in Ogden.

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