People — and their creative solutions — are the driver behind Gulf Coast Limestone’s success.

Why is Gulf Coast Limestone able to unload over 80,000 rail cars per year?

Why are we one of the industry’s largest unloaders of open-top rail cars?

Donald Broussard (left) and Primo Araujo (right) have been with Gulf Coast Limestone for more than 25 years and pioneered some of the company’s innovative practices.

About 25 years ago, I was a young supervisor, new to the position and with a lot to learn about the aggregates business. We had a rubber-tired excavator, which we drove from yard to yard and job to job. We had it all figured out. After all, with a machine which was also a truck and an operator who was also the driver, well, what could be better than that?

Primo Araujo was the operator who was also the driver. He could drive from Seabrook, Texas, where our home office was, to Dickinson, Texas (about 10 miles away), unload five cars for the county, and drive back to Seabrook in one day. We were the experts.

In Gulf Coast Limestone’s early days, a rubber-tired excavator was driven from job to job to unload cars.

We had three yards of our own where we railed in limestone base from Texas Crushed Stone, unloaded it onto the ground, and sold it by the truck load. One of our yards was in Baytown, Texas, which was on the other side of the Houston Ship Channel from our home office. At that time, the road to Baytown went through a tunnel under the ship channel. It was one lane each way and quite narrow.

Primo, our very brave and highly skilled operator, would drive the excavator through the tunnel. The machine did okay on the downhill portion of the tunnel, but when coming up the other side, it slowed to a snail’s pace, stacking up traffic and irritating motorists unlucky enough to get stuck behind the excavator. Primo was accustomed to various hand gestures, such as the “California Howdy” of Beverly Hillbillies fame.

Today, Gulf Coast Limestone has a fleet of 50 excavators and unloads rail cars for major aggregate producers in Texas, Louisiana, and Oklahoma.

As our business grew, we added another rubber-tired excavator, and we drove them all over, to unload a few cars here and a few cars there. One of our yards was on Old Galveston Road in Webster, Texas, and was called the Fondren Yard. It was a rail siding which had previously been a public team track, and the rail ran very close to the road. It could hold 12 cars.

It eventually became busy enough to leave a machine there permanently. My grandfather, Bill Robinson, who founded the company and ran it in those days, purchased an old John Deere 690 B excavator from a Ritchie Bros. auction and put it in the Fondren Yard. It was one of those old-style excavators with long control levers sticking up from the floor, sort of between the operator’s knees. If you tried to swing left and close the bucket at the same time, you would bang your knuckles together.

Approximately 25 years ago, an equipment operator discovered a quicker, cleaner way to unload rail cars using this clamshell. Since that time, the company has grown a fleet of excavators with proprietary buckets and patented ramps to handle its unloading process.

We had recently hired another operator named Donald Broussard who didn’t mind operating the John Deere. He would unload a set of cars from the ground, leave the material piled up alongside the track, and then flatten out the piles so that he could drive the excavator on top of the material. The added elevation made it easier to unload the next train.