Patriot, you have an exciting year ahead of you..!
You may want to consider getting a shear to help. Productivity is key but safety is a big deal too. The shear could pull large chunks out of the site to where the burners could safely cut it down to chunks that can be loaded. The entire shear could be leased, or you could get a big trackhoe and just lease the shear attachment. You will need to consider how to load gondola cars, too. Another trackhoe with an orange peel grapple or similar would be pretty useful. I understand that it can take some skill to load a car to load limit with scrap--it is surprising how you can easily underload a car, and that will cost you big time in freight charges. 250 tons is about 2-1/2 carloads, so you would need to be able to process and prep the scrap for the week and do the final carloading in about a day to avoid demurrage charges.
Depending on who you make a deal with, you may also consider stuffing sea cans with scrap rather than railcars. There are sea can loaders that you can prefill with scrap to within lbs of load limit and then push the scrap into the cans. The other way is to load the cans with a bobcat and grapple bucket.
Sounds pretty exciting-like you are looking at taking down a plant of some sort. Is there any opportunity to part out stuff and resell for better than scrap? Opportunities to separate out non-ferrous? (You mentioned electric motors, but is there any plant wiring? electrical controls?)
Looking forward to learn more as you are able to post it!!
Jon.
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