Information on US Freight Cars

[trisonic]

Here are some more, as promised, from the same day:

 

 

 

 

 

Best, Pete.

 

 

[Adrian Wintle]

The second car looks like the Difco cars that Walthers has done in N (and presumably HO).

 

Adrian

[trisonic]

It certainly looks like one of those - and makes sense as part of a ballast train.

 

Best, Pete.

[dave1905]

The air  or side dump car is a different animal from the ballast car and used for different purposes.

 

The NHIR car is used to dump ballast on the track for maintaining the track.

 

The air dump is used to dump rock or ballast beside the track to build up the shoulders of the track.  Air dumps tend to carry bigger rock up to rip-rap (rocks about 2-3 ft in diameter)

[trisonic]

Dave you can see the rocks in one of my photos, don't forget that it is only a shortline.

 

Best, Pete.

[dave1905]

Being a shortline or class 1 is immaterial.  The two different cars are used for two different things.  The number of cars is because its a shortline.  A class one would have trains of side dumps and many trains of ballast cars.  A shortline has one of each.

 

The side dump is used to deliver any size rock and particularly designed for rock bigger than ballast.  The ballast car is designed to dump ballast on the track.  The MK doors allow ballast to be dumped inside or outside the rails and  regulates the flow of ballast.

 

The rock in the background would go in the side dump, its too big for the ballast car.

[dave1905]

I've tamped ballast on the NHIR many moons ago. (technically it was the Valhalla Trolley Museum but it was the same track).  Also unloaded cars and trains of ballast with conventional and MK doors.  Never unloaded side dumps personally.

 

A shortline could dump ballast with a conventional hopper.  The trackmen attach a chain to the doors and up to side sill to control the amount the doors open and then put a tie across the tracks in fron of the rear truck and slowly pull the car forward.  The tie levels out the ballast and spreads it across the track.  Been there done that.

 

Modern ballast trains are remote control satellite trains, that use GPS and powered doors to let one person unload exactly as much ballast as the want in exactly the places they want.  Doing it the other way is a way dusty and hot way to spend an afternoon.

[trisonic]

 

 

The rock in the background would go in the side dump, its too big for the ballast car.

Yes, that is what I meant. They had a front loader around the side ready to load it. The two cars later were moved off together.

 

Best, Pete.

Edited December 23, 2013 by trisonic

[highpeak]

 

Here is a hopper equipped with side discharge hoppers dropping ballast on the Belfast and Moosehead Lake in the late 70s.
This is not the same kind of hopper as the NHIR car but it has what look to be similar discharge doors. The cut of ballast hoppers had been picked up by the daily freight train from Belfast to Burnham Jct and dropped the ballast on the return trip.

 

Maine Central had some side dump cars. This rather shabby example was sitting at a loading dock in Lewiston in the late 70s, presumably waiting for a load:

[highpeak]

Running boards and high mounted handbrakes on new boxcars were banned from late 1966 and by the 70s the railroads had been busy removing running boards from older cars. But you could still see the odd car with running boards. The CP car above still had its running board in place when I snapped it in late 1979 in St. Johnsbury VT.

 

By then running boards on boxcars really stood out from the herd but you did see the odd one.

 

The car had been given an ACI plate, barely visible in the dirt to the left of the door and a faded yellow dot signifying that the wheels had been inspected and were not part of a faulty batch of wheels that the FRA felt had experienced a high failure rate in service. It has not been stencilled with the consolidated stencil that was appearing on cars in the 70s.

 

This thread http://www.hosam.com/mod/rsdet.html has information about the dots, the ACI plate, the stenciles and so on.

 

 

 

[highpeak]

 

The two D&H boxcars snapped in the early 80s were both originally built by Pullman-Standard for the Reading. The D&H acquired the cars in 1976 as part of the complex series of transactions that reorganised the bankrupt Northeastern railroads into Conrail.

 

The cars are classified as XL according to the AAR Mechanical Designation codes. XL signifies a boxcar that is equipped with devices to protect the load. This page http://espee.railfan.net/aar_1989.html gives an overview of the designations in use in 1989.

 

The notes in the 1977 ORER mention "end of car cushioning" and DF loaders. The end cushioning device is fairly obvious, and the Reading car advertises its DF (Damage Free) features. While nothing you would really need to model unless you wanted to have the doors open, the D-F features are of interest and were described well in vol 15 of Railway Prototype Cyclopedia.

 

DF loaders were developed by Evans Products in the early 1940s. The system consisted of angles that ran at various heights from the floor along the side of the car from door post to corner post. Removable angles could be positioned across door openings if needed. Cross bars and transverse bulkheads could be locked into the angles and moved along the angles up to the lading to restrain it and reduce damage. The Reading cars appear to have been equipped with four angles up the side of the car to cater for different sizes of lading.

 

In the thread on graffiti F-Unit Mad mentions his preference for the late 70s/early 80s scene because of the lack of graffiti. I don't recall seeing any graffiti on boxcars similar to the "artwork" that adorns most cars today, you might see a bit of scribble (not the markings of car men) but boxcars generally appeared as the two shown above, usually not completely filthy (although you could find some really shabby examples) but definitely showing the signs of use. By the late 70s most cars had the various stencils and plates referred to in a previous post. The wheel dots weren't applied to new cars after 1978 and the ACI plate was discontinued earlier, but they were not removed from older cars until they were rebuilt or repainted.

 

Paint patches were becoming quite common as flags fell and equipment was sold off. Old paint schemes could still be seen long after the road was but a memory.

 

The yellow car shows up the usual scratches, dings and rust quite well, especially the scrape marks caused by door.

[highpeak]

In 1953 General American Transportation Company introduced the Airslide covered hopper car. These cars, while bearing a passing resemblance to other covered hoppers then in use, featured a pneumatic unloading system developed in collaboration with the Fuller Company of Pennsylvania. At the bottom of the hoppers were strips of silicon-treated cotton fabric about a foot wide. Underneath the strips were steel U-sections into which low-pressure air could be forced. The air passed into the lading to make it flow to the discharge outlets. This greatly improved unloading times, according to an article in Railway Age in 1956 it took one man 2 hours 18 minutes to unload just over 50 tons of material from an Airslide car compared to two men needing over 5 hours to unload 35 tons from a conventional covered hopper.

The unloading hatches could either be simple gravity devices or fitted with pneumatic connectors.

Up top, the loading hatches were equipped with gaskets to make them air and waterproof to protect the material which was generally food products such as flour or chemicals such as carbon black.

The most common colour scheme for the cars was grey, though some received aluminum, with black lettering. The roof was normally painted with black car cement and slate dust sprinkled in while the coating was wet to give better footing for workers opening and closing the hatches.

BM5804 was built in 1957 and leased fromm GATC and originally carried GATX reporting marks. The cars were used to carry wheat and had the somewhat unusual lettering shown. The 1977 ORER notes that the series of cars was owned by GATC.

The PC car with the ransom-letter style reporting marks was built in 1959 and leased to the PRR. The PRR designated them as class H40. If your skills at applying decals aren't very good, here's your prototype.

This is a much later car, built in 1979 and a bit larger than the first two. It was leased to Tennant and Hoyt, flour millers, who clearly understood the value of an attractive paint job and were proud of the fact that Ralph Samuelson, inventor of water skiing, was born in their home town of Lake City. There was probably no room to note that Laura Ingalls Wilder was also born there.
The Golden Loaf cars were very eye-catching and GACX48191 had made its way from Minnesota all the way to a bakery in Lewiston, ME. I believe the CP delivered the car to St Johnsbury VT for the MEC to haul it over the mountains to Portland, then the Portland-Augusta road switcher would drop it at Brunswick for the Lewiston Lower branch train to pick it up and deliver it.
Seduced by the paint scheme I spent hours building an Ambroid kit for this car. No sooner had I finished it than Walthers produced their model, as is the usual course of things. 

Information from Railway Prototype Cyclopedia who ran articles on this type of car and on the predecessor Trans-Flo cars in volumes 17, 20 and 22.

[highpeak]

I went to Steamtown a couple of weeks ago on a rather raw day, mostly to have a look at the Maine Central 2-8-0 which turned out to be buried among the "diamonds in the rough" and not really accessible for pictures. It turned out to be a good day because I got a personal tour of the workshops since nobody else was there. Before that I took a few pictures of a PRR boxcar that had been tidied up and placed near the entrance to the buildings.
These pictures may help somebody trying to improve a less-detailed model or they may just answer some questions about how things are arranged.
This picture shows how the brake line is attached to a bracket and not glued to the floor of the car.

At the other end of the car you can see the way the cut lever is attached to a bracket.

This photograph shows some detail of the brackets at the end of the centre sill around the coupler, the hand brake linkage and the brake retainer pipe.

Finally, looking up at the running board you can see the brackets that secure it to the car at the end.

[LNRR]

Regarding the DIFFCO type side dump car; here's a video I shot of one being unloaded on the NS near my home in 2011: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_7NhUqQ_Ek

[cooley_boy]

rrpicturearchives.net

 

I use this site all the time for basing my car load and weathering for loco as well.

[Steve Lucas]

Here are some more, as promised, from the same day:

 

IMG_20112.jpg

 

IMG_20113.jpg

 

IMG_20114.jpg

 

IMG_20115.jpg

 

Best, Pete.

The second and third images are of a "Western" design air-dump car, built for Canadian National by the Eastern Car Company of Trenton, Nova Scotia, in the 1950's.  Accurate models of these were made as brass imports in HO scale around 1990.

[jasond]

Apropos of nothing at all, as an O-scaler of '70s and early '80s I have to agonise over what roof to use when the photo only shows the sides and ends, and the ends of the roof ribs.  For a start 50ft boxcars with PS ends have PS roofs, with IDE ends and 14 roof rib ends have diagonal panel roofs, with 10 roof rib ends have X-panel roofs.  Repairs/rebuilds don't count, Reading boxcars acquired by the D&H at Conrail formation forced this on me.   Yes they're still packed away for this protracted house move - sobbing starts again....

Jason

[chaz]

Interesting topic. Especially for a UK modeller as US practice is so very different.

 

Can somebody tell me please would the inside timbers of a wood boxcar be painted? I assume the floor wouldn't be.

I am presently repainting some Bachmann On30 boxcars and want to deal with the interiors as the doors can be left open.

 

Chaz

[Adrian Wintle]

Interesting topic. Especially for a UK modeller as US practice is so very different.

 

Can somebody tell me please would the inside timbers of a wood boxcar be painted? I assume the floor wouldn't be.

I am presently repainting some Bachmann On30 boxcars and want to deal with the interiors as the doors can be left open.

 

Chaz

 

Probably not, but it might depend on the intended traffic and whether it was single- or double-sheathed.

 

There is an interior shot of a grain boxcar at 11:57 here: https://www.nfb.ca/film/grain_elevator (actually a very interesting film if modelling grain operations)

 

Adrian

Edited September 14, 2015 by Adrian Wintle

[chaz]

Probably not, but it might depend on the intended traffic and whether it was single- or double-sheathed.

 

There is an interior shot of a grain boxcar at 11:57 here: https://www.nfb.ca/film/grain_elevator (actually a very interesting film if modelling grain operations)

 

Adrian

 

Thanks for that. Interesting that an obviously steel boxcar is timber lined. Was that usual, or does it depend on the load again?

[Adrian Wintle]

Thanks for that. Interesting that an obviously steel boxcar is timber lined. Was that usual, or does it depend on the load again?

 

That is probably because of the grain load.

 

Adrian

Edited September 15, 2015 by Adrian Wintle

[Zomboid]

So apologies for the slightly off topic question, but it's car related, if not freight... Does anyone know between which dates the Southern Pacific ran two tone grey passenger cars?

Cheers.

[long island jack]

have a look here http://espee.railfan.net/passenger-paint.html

 

Ray

[2996 Victor]

Hi,

 

I've bought a couple of car kits on eBay, a reefer and a stock car, which aren't appropriate for either of my current projects, but which could be of use for a potential future project.....

 

As far as the stock car is concerned, when it comes to finishing and weathering, I'd be interested to know what cleaning and disinfecting regulations were in place across the US around 1910. In Britain at that time, cattle wagons were washed out with slaked lime, which in traffic gave the effect as seen here on a rake of GWR wagons:

 

 

And these are Canadian Pacific stock cars, which as I understand, it were washed with slaked lime until the mid-1920s:

 

 

What did US railroads use to clean and sanitise livestock cars?

 

Cheers,

 

Mark

[doctor quinn]

I don't think that Canadian stock car cars were lime washed rather they were white painted on the lower parts to ensure cleanliness, for that matter I understand that British stock cars wernt lime washed after modern disinfectants like Jeyes were available

Edited June 2, 2018 by doctor quinn