Information on US Freight Cars

[DanielB]

Evening everyone,

 

I'm wondering if any websites exist regarding information - build details, identification of types, what goods were carried etc - on US freight cars, similar to how http://www.ltsv.com/w_home.php is useful for UK rolling stock?

 

I'm a bit of a newbie to US modelling and so would like to overcome my ignorance on the prototype.

 

I've had a scoot around on Google but didn't find anything similar, so any help would be most appreciated.

 

Thanks,

 

Dan

[DelawareAndHudson]

Dan,

 

 

Here's some things to get you started.

 

 

Old stuff - Steam Era Freight Cars

 

http://steamerafreightcars.com/index.html

 

 

 

TONS of articles on freight cars available for FREE on TrainLife.  They appear to have most of all issues of Railmodel Journal, Model RailroaDING, and Prototype Modeler.  If you're looking for modern freight car stuff (to me that is 70's and 80's because I pretty much stop at 1988), pay particular attention to Jim Eager's articles.  Railmodel Journal featured his stuff and many other knowledgeable authors over the years.  I have a complete set of Railmodel Journal from issue 1 to the final issue in my personal collection.  I really miss getting that magazine each month.

 

 

http://www.trainlife.com/magazines/model-train-magazine-index

 

 

There are also a number of very useful but possibly overwhelming Yahoo Groups.  For modern freight cars, check out 'Modern Freight Car List'.

 

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/MFCL/

 

 

Steam Era Freight Cars has their own list:

 

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/STMFC/

 

 

Then there's the Baby Boomer Freight Car List that overlaps the other two.  Not near as busy but it is worth joining if you're going to join the other two.  

 

http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/bbfcl/

 

 

I will highly recommend that you set up some rules in your Inbox to handle the traffic from MFCL or STMFC.  I have emails automatically routed to their own folders because either list can completely overrun your inbox when a new product gets announced or some other excitement occurs.

 

 

Just stumbled across this one that I don't recall seeing before.  Just found some D&H images I haven't seen before.

 

 

http://www.boxcars.us/

 

 

 

I'm sure others will have more good info.  Just trying to skim the archives of MFCL or STMFC would take you a year or two though.  

 

 

Jason

[Tove]

Another good one is the Freight cars illistrated site,

 

http://www.fcix.info/

 

Lots of information avalible and you can also buy e-books and CD`s loaded with photo`s.

I have several and there very good.

 

Brain.

[DelawareAndHudson]

Here's another one. RailcarPhotos

 

 

http://www.railcarphotos.com/index.php?

 

 

 

Jason

[highpeak]

The mix of car types and how some freight was carried changed over the years. Grain travels in covered hoppers these days, in the past it travelled in boxcars, the doors being sealed to allow it to be loaded.
The paper industry in Maine received pulpwood and kaolin among other things. Pulpwood was often transported in old boxcars that had the roof removed and possibly the arrangement of doors altered. This was a frugal way of getting more life out of old wooden boxcars for a traffic that was somewhat seasonal in the days when wood could be dumped in a river and floated to where the mill was. When that practice ended and the pulpwood traffic became a bit more regular (and the supply of recyclable wooden boxcars dwindled), then pulpwood racks became more common.

Kaolin came up from Georgia in modified boxcars, the Southern added hatches in the roof for easier loading. This was another traffic that eventually went over to hoppers, in the 70s you could see both boxcars and hoppers carrying the stuff.

It's a fascinating subject as you'll see by browsing the sites D&H and Tove have linked to. For modelling purposes that trainlife site is a great resource, you can spend hours on that site

[CraigZ]

Regarding the three Yahoo lists -

 

The Steam Era list covers up to 1960; the Modern list is 1960 and later; the Baby Boomer list is essentially post 1954 but its traffic is heavily 1960s and early 1970s related.   The Modern list seems to be more heavily 1980s and newer.

 

And I must say that the knowledge base available on the Steam Era list is amazing in its depth, especially when one considers that the subject matter has been defunct for 50+ years.

 

Kaolin was (and may still be) into the 21st century carried in box cars, albeit not in bulk.  It was shipped in 50 lb paper sacks and in 2,000 lb 'supersacks'...I watched boxcars being loaded with both at a kaolin mining and processing operation near Tennile, Georgia.  The majority was into covered hoppers but the box car traffic still existed.  I've not been back there since 2003 so no idea if that's still the case.

Edited July 21, 2013 by CraigZ

[highpeak]

Probably more info than the OP needs on this particular aspect, but Southern did have several batches of boxcars listed in the Official Railway Equipment Register as being equipped with roof hatches for bulk commodities. In the late 70s they travelled into Maine and were quite conspicuous with the weathering pattern. I'm assuming they were carrying bulk shipments not bags, the weathering pattern seems to suggest this. 32478 was part of a batch of 57 (32435-32499) in the April 1977 ORER. I always thought they would make an interesting modification to a standard car.

The boxcars were outnumbered though by hoppers from both the Southern and the Sandersville RR.

 

Perhaps more use to the OP is the info about the ORER. It's an industry publication that lists all the rolling stock a road has, describing it using standard codes e.g., XM is a boxcar, XF is a boxcar that may have a lining for use with food products and so on. The register lists dimensions. From a modelling perspective it's perhaps a bit limited (no pictures in it) but it does help with historical research. Various sources for them including reprints from the NMRA, some volumes available on CD. It's handy to have one for the period you are modelling, if for no other reason than to determine if a road still had a particular car/hadn't yet bought the car, assuming you want to get that picky.

[dave1905]

Those were kaolin cars, powdered clay used in finishing paper.  So they would be going to a paper mill in Maine to make smooth finished paper.

 

By the way that's a PS-1 boxcar made by Pullman Standard.  You can tell by the even corrugations on the ends.  The tank car next to it is a a compressed gas car, probably LPG, propane, butane.  The car behind it is an exterior post 50 ft boxcar, probably ex-PRR, AAR type XL, meaning it is equipped with load dividers for securing the lading.

Edited July 23, 2013 by dave1905

[highpeak]

The car behind the Southern is indeed an ex PRR X-58c, same batch as this one http://pc.smellycat.com/pics/equip/pc266211.jpg although the car in my picture was in basic all-over filth rather than anything like the PC scheme. Armed with the knowledge that it's an X-58 boxcar, a google search leads us to http://pc.smellycat.com/docs/model/boxcarm.html and that page in turn gives some references to magazines that had articles about X-58 boxcars.

 

The tank car is WRNX 30155. WRNX is a reporting mark assigned (or it was in 1977) to Gulf Oil. My dog-eared copy of the ORER tells me that the car was one of a batch of 202 similar cars built to ICC-112A340W specification. That may seem like useless information, except a google search came up with a link to an article in Prototype Modeller on that type of car at http://www.trainlife.com/magazines/pages/777/50751/august-1978-page-23 If you want to know what all those letters and numbers mean, this is a useful link http://www.henrycoema.org/forms/ scroll down to Railroad Tank Car Marking system and you can open a pdf that decodes the specification.

 

I hope this illustrates how some basic information such as the ORER provides, or just the reporting marks if the car belonged to a road that has a big enough following and online sites like the one I linked to, can get you the knowledge you are after. And spend a lot of enjoyable time doing, ahem, research.

[highpeak]

I see this thread has been pinned, presumably to be some sort of repository for general information on freight cars. This could be a useful resource if enough people chip in.

I mentioned earlier that methods of transporting some freight changed over the years. Pulpwood was one such category, relatively low value material, typically not traveling very far and possibly not being interchanged. I don't think any pulpwood traffic that originated on Maine Central was interchanged other than some off the Beecher Falls branch, and there was a flow of wood off the Bangor and Aroostook on to the Maine Central.

Pulpwood at the originating end is an easy traffic to incorporate into a model railroad if your layout is set in an appropriate part of the country, as there was little in the way of loading machinery. They could travel in ones and twos on local freights and then be consolidated into a train to serve a paper mill.

In to the 1960s pulpwood was a somewhat seasonal traffic as a lot of it was driven down rivers to the mills. The logging industry was not as mechanized and production could come to a stop in bad weather. MEC thus had a problem of feast or famine, and it made no sense to spend a lot of money on dedicated cars that would sit idle a lot of the time. In to the 60s there were plenty of old wooden cars around that could be used and which weren't going to fetch a lot in scrap, so they were modified and went into pulpwood service.

Pre-war pulpwood cars were pretty disreputable looking jobs and would present a bit of a challenge to the scratch-builder:

Some were a bit more substantial:

(These three photos Robert C Baker Sr, my collection)

 

Use of rivers declined in the 60s, the old cars wore out and newer ones took their place, still using deroofed boxcars, also some of the low-sided gondolas were converted as the traffic they had been used (coal, limestone) for dwindled.

There was enough money in the traffic to buy some purpose-built cars to supplement the home-made jobs:

Both MEC and BAR pushed the size of these racks when they asked Magor to build a batch that were 64' between the outside bulkheads. There were 200 of these cars on the MEC but the order was not repeated.

The deck on these racks is not flat, it slopes in to the middle so the load stays put without any need for restraints. This of course means the pulpwood has to be cut to the correct size (4') and loaded properly. The long cars couldn't be fully loaded as the weight was too much, there are two load limit markings on the car depending on the kind of wood being loaded.

Guilford stopped hauling the 4' cuts of pulpwood in 1996, so all the cars shown were redundant, some were converted for MOW use hauling scrap ties.

[Neil Rogers]

this site is always worth a look!

 

http://www.railcarphotos.com/

 

 

regards

Neil

[trisonic]

I've unpinned this - it might make more people contribute...

 

I've found that people in Europe need more basic information, such as:

 

When did walkways disappear from the roof, was it due to legislation?

 

Were the various styles of caboose introduced at different times and were all modern styles around at the same time?

 

Was the boxcar still prevalent up to the end of the sixties for general goods (as opposed to specific freight)? Were the various lengths of steel boxcars around at the same time?

 

Just as examples.

 

Basic questions like this are usually overlooked on websites, in books etc. 

 

Best, Pete.

[dave1905]

Roofwalks : New house cars built after 1966 were not built with roofwalks.  Roofwalks were banned in interchange after 1982.  AAR (American Association of Railroads).

 

Cabooses : Yes the various cabooses were built over the last 100 years or so.  Cupola cabooses became popular in the 1870's, bay window cabooses in the 1930's.  Caboose started falling out of favor in the 1980's.  Bobber (2 axle cabooses) fell out of favor in the 1930's but some made it to the 1940's.  Cupola cabooses fell out of favor in the 1970's and most cabooses built after that were bay window.

 

Boxcar : The boxcar is still used for general freight. 

Up to the 1870's most boxcars were under 30 feet IL.

From the 1870's to the 1890's 34 ft was very common.

36 ft boxcars came into favor in the1890's.

Starting around 1900 40 ft boxcars became more common.

50 ft cars started to be produced around the end of WW1.

60 and 87 ft cars came into favor around the 1960's.

By the end of WW2 most 36 ft cars were out of service.

By the late 1980's most 40 ft cars were out of service. 

In the 1970's and 1980's you could see boxcars from 40 to 87 ft in service.

 

All of these dates are "squishy" because various changes were phased in over time, there are very few "hard" dates.  There were 50 and 60 ft boxcars built in the 1880's.  Plus older cars might still be used in company or non-interchange service.  A car had to be removed from interchange service if it was over 40 years old unless it had been rebuilt.

Edited December 7, 2013 by dave1905

[trisonic]

Great information, thanks, Dave.

 

Best, Pete.

[dave1905]

So if you are modeling in the late 70's, early 80's you could have cars with high brakes and roof walks, cars with no roof walks and high brakes, cars that used to have roofwalks and low brakes and cars built with low brakes and no roof walk.

 

Cabooses are all over the place.  They tended to be rebuilt and recycled so you could have a caboose built in the 1940's on one train and one built in the 1970's on the next.  Most major roads in the 1970's had a mix of cupola and bay window cabs.  Many times cabooses were mixed and matched due to mergers and bankruptcies.  The MP (and subsequently UP) had ex-CRIP cabooses.  The UP ended up with both ex-MP and ex-MKT wide vision cupola cabooses.

 

Boxcars are still used for general freight, its just more of it goes in intermodal now.  Grain moves in conventional containers instead of covered hoppers too.  Some specialized cars also handled a variety of commodities.  ex-MP 60 ft boxcars were used for auto parts, appliances, paper and oddly enough, hay loading (although car distribution HATED loading a $200 load of hay in a boxcar that could be loading a $1000 load of appliances).

[highpeak]

The 70s were quite an interesting period as far as running boards were concerned. By the end of the decade, very few cars had them left, I remember they were quite noticeable when one came by in a train.

As Dave has noted, what was outlawed was running boards and the way older cars were altered varied. Some roads simply removed the running boards and left the handbrake where it had always been, up high. So at the B end of the car, everything looked the same as it always had. At the A end, there being no need to climb up high, the ladders really served no purpose and were cut down.

In other cases roads did a more thorough job and the handbrake was lowered as this picture shows (I've posted it elsewhere but it may as well be in here because it might be of use to somebody). Notice where the retainer valve ended up, you can just about make it out next to the step underneath the brake wheel.

[highpeak]

Cabooses could be quite long-lived since they generally weren't interchanged. MEC had some very old buggies that hung around for a long time and from a distance looked newer than they were. The plywood they nailed over the sides could be mistaken for metal (at least when the paint was fresh), but when you looked closer and saw the truss rods you realised this was quite an old caboose.

The truss rod I beams were quite interesting:

 

[dave1905]

That looks like it has been extensively rebuilt since it has a steel underframe. 

[highpeak]

I'm not sure when the 582 was built, most of the wooden cabooses dated from around 1909 to the late 20s. MEC's preferred builder seems to have been Laconia from 1909 to 1912, then they had a batch from AC&F in 1914 and after that built cabooses themselves in the Thompson Point shops in Portland. The 582 was a home built job.

I would imagine they all ended up with steel underframes, certainly most of the pictures on the Mountain Subdivision after WW2 show helpers behind the caboose which I don't think they'd do with an old wooden frame.

These pictures show the steel center sill. It's handy having access to a car that you know isn't going anywhere!

[highpeak]

The straight sided covered hopper with two compartments dates back quite a long way. Possibly the earliest example of covered hopper built for a specific purpose was built by American Car and Foundry in 1911 for Anheuser-Busch to haul brewer's malt. A number of roads built covered hoppers in the 20s and 30s to protect loads such as cement that needed to be kept dry and free from contamination in transit and reduce the loading and unloading costs compared to bagged loads in boxcars.

What could be considered the breakthrough design appeared in 1932 from AC&F. It was a fairly large (for the time) 70 ton capacity car with two compartments further divided about the center sill to give four hopper compartments discharging through four bottom outlets. The design would be imitated with various differences by 8 builders and be a fairly common sight into the 1980s.

Maine Central used three different builders for their covered hoppers delivered between 1940 and 1957 in batches of about 15 cars at a time. The cars were used primarily for cement traffic at the cement plant in Thomaston on the Rockland branch, though some were assigned for lime traffic out of Hinckley on the Skowhegan branch.

The first couple of batches MEC bought from AC&F in 1940 and 1942 were slightly smaller than the original design at 1,790 cu ft compared to 2,050 cu ft. They were about 3' shorter and recognisable by the small triangular opening between the compartments and the shape of the side sills at the end. This design, with some variations, was fairly common in the east, the L&NE being one road that had similar cars. These cars had been relegated to service duties by the late 70s.

The final batch of AC&F cars arrived in 1947 and differed slightly from the earlier batches as shown. The original capacity was 70 tons but at some point the cars received different trucks and gained an extra 7 tons capacity. The builder's photo and 1953 ORER both show 70 tons but the lettering on the car and the 1977 ORER both show 77 tons.

The next batch of cars came in 1952 from Pullman-Standard and differed little from the AC&F cars:

The following year MEC turned to Bethlehem Steel for another 15 cars. These cars were slightly shorter than the previous delivery and were fairly easy to distinguish with no triangular opening, a slightly fishbellied side sill and different loading hatches among other features. MEC2461 was unusual in having picked up some graffiti, most of these cars by the late 70s were too filthy for anybody to scrawl anything on them.

The last batches of cement hoppers came from P-S in 1954 and 1957 and offered a slight higher cubic capacity at 2,003 cu ft.

Intermountain do two different versions of the AC&F car that offer a nice degree of detail and refinement. Kadee make a very good version of the P-S car, and offered a MEC version lettered MEC2491. I saw it at the Springfield show and thought it looked familiar. The brake piping is very fine for a RTR car. Other manufacturers (Atlas, Bowser) have covered these cars, but I think the Intermountain and Kadee offerings are a bit more refined albeit more expensive. MDC has had a P-S car for a long time but it would take a lot of work to bring it up to the standard of the Kadee offering. That said, it's a route to an approximation of the Bethlehem Steel cars if you don't like the idea of hacking a $30 car around.

I've tried to show that there is considerable variety within this type of car. Other builders had their versions, the ones built by Greenville were very distinctive with a fishbelly side sill similar to but more pronounced than the Bethlehem Steel car.

 

Sources: Railway Prototype Cyclopedia vol 15 (Greenville cars) and 27 (AC&F cars). There have been various articles in most of the modelling magazines over the years, although some of the modifications are rendered obsolete by the more recent trade offerings.

Edited December 20, 2013 by highpeak

[trisonic]

I took a photo of this in New Hope PA a couple of years ago. I always thought that it "lost" a roof... Built in November 1955 and refurbished by the NHRR recently. Is it one?

 

 

Best, Pete.

 

 

[The Bigbee Line]

Dan,

 

 

Here's some things to get you started.

 

 

Old stuff - Steam Era Freight Cars

 

http://steamerafreightcars.com/index.html

 

 

 

TONS of articles on freight cars available for FREE on TrainLife.  They appear to have most of all issues of Railmodel Journal, Model RailroaDING, and Prototype Modeler.  If you're looking for modern freight car stuff (to me that is 70's and 80's because I pretty much stop at 1988), pay particular attention to Jim Eager's articles.  Railmodel Journal featured his stuff and many other knowledgeable authors over the years.  I have a complete set of Railmodel Journal from issue 1 to the final issue in my personal collection.  I really miss getting that magazine each month.

 

 

http://www.trainlife.com/magazines/model-train-magazine-index

 

 

There are also a number of very useful but possibly overwhelming Yahoo Groups.  For modern freight cars, check out 'Modern Freight Car List'.

 

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/MFCL/

 

 

Steam Era Freight Cars has their own list:

 

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/STMFC/

 

 

Then there's the Baby Boomer Freight Car List that overlaps the other two.  Not near as busy but it is worth joining if you're going to join the other two.  

 

http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/bbfcl/

 

 

I will highly recommend that you set up some rules in your Inbox to handle the traffic from MFCL or STMFC.  I have emails automatically routed to their own folders because either list can completely overrun your inbox when a new product gets announced or some other excitement occurs.

 

 

Just stumbled across this one that I don't recall seeing before.  Just found some D&H images I haven't seen before.

 

 

http://www.boxcars.us/

 

 

 

I'm sure others will have more good info.  Just trying to skim the archives of MFCL or STMFC would take you a year or two though.  

 

 

Jason

Thanks for the useful links, plenty of reading for over christmas

[Adrian Wintle]

I took a photo of this in New Hope PA a couple of years ago. I always thought that it "lost" a roof... Built in November 1955 and refurbished by the NHRR recently. Is it one?

 

IMG_20110.jpg

 

Best, Pete.

 

That looks very like MEC 2461 from the post above. Not only does it appear to have lost its roof, but the hopper outlets have also been modified. Perhaps it has been converted to a ballast car?

 

You can still occasionally see straight-sided 2-bay covered hoppers in service today. I saw one of the P-S cars in fracking sand sevice in October on the Wellsboro and Corning. The rest of the cars in the train were curved-side ones.

 

Adrian

Edited December 20, 2013 by Adrian Wintle

[highpeak]

Quite a few covered hoppers got deroofed and converted to ballast hoppers in the 70s. Morrison-Knudsen designed discharge doors that were self-clearing and could deposit the ballast either side of the rail head. It looks like that New Hope and Ivyland is equipped with them. They were a patented design, as I recall M-K would either rebuild cars for you or sell you a kit to do it yourself.

Speaking of kits, E&B Valley offered a ballast car version of their AC&F hopper.

[trisonic]

. Perhaps it has been converted to a ballast car?

 

Adrian

Yes.

I have to dig up my photo of the car behind (which at the time I found more interesting).......

I'll post it here later.

 

Best, Pete.