40ft and 50ft Boxcars

[Windjabbers]

Just very broadly how long was the overlap between 40ft boxcars on 50ft boaxcars in the U.S and are any 50ft still in service now?

 

Have picked up some US stuff and trying to work out if i can run it all together?

 

Thanks

 

David

[dave1905]

40 ft cars became common in the late 1900's early 1910's and lasted as a "common" car into the late 1970's and early 1980's (there are still some 40 ft boxcars out there for special service). Canadian roads tended to keep 40 ft cars longer because they hauled grain on light branch lines, so if you are modeling Canada you can stretch that out the 1990's. 50 ft cars became "common" after WW1 and and there are still thousands of them in service.

 

So the major overlap was from the 1920's through the 1980's.

[Windjabbers]

Thnaks that helpful.

 

2nd question. After merger how long would it take for the stock to be rebranded. For exampe on the creation of say the Burlington Northern in 1970 how long afterwards would you still of come across Great Northern boxcars?

 

Cheers

 

David

[Allegheny1600]

A pretty long time, I should say!

I guess there are no hard & fast rules about such things but it certainly has not seemed to be much of a priority to get rolling stock painted up in a new merger scheme.

For example, Union Pacific is STILL running some C&NW and SP (Espee!) GE dash 9's (Locomotives) some 15-16 years after the respective mergers, therefore you can bet that boxcars and other rolling stock will survive for even longer. They will have the new companies reporting marked added as soon as possible, of course!

So, as long as you don't exceed the 40 year rule and in your quoted case of BN in 1970, DO remove roofwalks and high level ladders etc, I'm sure you could easily have CB&Q, SPS and so forth, cars still running in the 1990's and later.

Cheers,

John E.

[Glorious NSE]

Depends on a few things, a company like BN would have "inherited" hundreds of thousands of items of rolling stock, it's not all going to change colour overnight. Unlike many companies BN did appear to have an active program of painting stock so the BN image did spread quickly - it still took 7 years to get all the loco's in green though!

 

For BN it seems that pre-merger stuff was common enough mixed in with the green into the mid 80s, by the 90s it's 20 years past merger date, so the replacement of cars plus repaints mean they are much fewer and further in between.

 

if you have a particular year in mind i'd suggest searching pics and seeing just what is back there behind the loco to get an idea of the real mixes out there. All the BN predecessors had pretty distinctive paint schemes.

[pH]

A pretty long time, I should say!

I guess there are no hard & fast rules about such things but it certainly has not seemed to be much of a priority to get rolling stock painted up in a new merger scheme.

For example, Union Pacific is STILL running some C&NW and SP (Espee!) GE dash 9's (Locomotives) some 15-16 years after the respective mergers, therefore you can bet that boxcars and other rolling stock will survive for even longer. They will have the new companies reporting marked added as soon as possible, of course!

John, I would agree that rolling stock can survive in pre-merger colour schemes for a long time. I saw a boxcar in SLSF (Frisco) livery (and it was in good condition) in 1996, where the Frisco had been absorbed into Burlington Northern in 1980. Also, locomotives are usually given number 'patches' quite quickly after amalgamations. However, rolling stock is often not 'rebranded' at all - the company doing the takeover will just take over the reporting marks as well.

[dave1905]

I still see lots of MP cars in UP trains and a few BN cars too. Its probably more like a "half life" thing. Half the cars get repainted in the first 5 years, half of the remain ing in the next 5 years, half of those in the next 5 and so on. Engines get painted faster than cars because engines go into shops more often than cars and stay on the property more than cars. So there are some pure CNW engines out there but you can count them on one hand and the number of "pure" SP engines (not counting tagger's paint) is probably well below 100.

[F-UnitMad]

... locomotives are usually given number 'patches' quite quickly after amalgamations. However, rolling stock is often not 'rebranded' at all - the company doing the takeover will just take over the reporting marks as well.

There still seems to be a lot of 'patching' on rolling stock as well, though? At least that's my impression from DVDs and You-Tube clips... I'd say patching is far more common than complete re-painting of stock.

Back to the OP - and it has been touched on - what really sets a time-frame is the removal of roofwalks from boxcars. The legislation came in in the early 1970's IIRC; by 1980-ish roofwalks would be rarely seen, apparently.

[davknigh]

Roofwalks were not included on cars built in the late '60s early '70s so for example a brand new Railbox car would not have a roofwalk and never did have one. Generally walks were removed as cars were repainted but sometimes as cars were shopped for any reason. CN noodle logo and CP action red cars would have had their roofwalks stripped off but older paint jobs did hang on to the walks for quite a while. I'm sure US roads would be the same.

 

Cars for internal use, ie not for interchange, hung on to their roofwalks and longer ladders and were the last to be converted

 

HTH

 

David

[pH]

There still seems to be a lot of 'patching' on rolling stock as well, though? At least that's my impression from DVDs and You-Tube clips... I'd say patching is far more common than complete re-painting of stock.

That happens when the car itself is sold, rather than when the owning railroad is taken over by another. For example, there are still some cars going around in Rock Island colours, but with different reporting marks - those cars were sold to new owners when RI folded. But, on the other hand, Union Pacific still uses reporting marks on UP cars from all sorts of railroads it absorbed (or which were absorbed by railroads that were then themselves absorbed by UP), such as MKT or CHTT.

[F-UnitMad]

That happens when the car itself is sold, rather than when the owning railroad is taken over by another.

Thanks for that clarification!

[dave1905]

CHTT is a separate subsidiary road. CMO (a lot of new large covered hoppers) is a fallen flag the UP owns. ARMN belongs to American Refrigerator Transit, a wholey owned subsidary of the MP and now the UP.

[BR60103]

The area under the reporting marks contains dated information that is updated when required -- bearings repacked, re-weighings. This might be a time when the reporting marks are changed.

On the other hand, cars may be left in the original numbers and initials if a change would conflict with the master road. Cars with special features might be left as a series if they had always been identified with it.

[Dr Gerbil-Fritters]

Just to confuse matters a little, some long-gone railroads are re-appearing on new rolling stock. I was told that this was to 'protect' the copyright/trademark whatever of the former road as part of its new owner.

 

 

For example, this newly painted hopper car seen on the Sunset Route in 2005 is branded for the St Louis Southwestern which folded into UP in 1996. I've also seen cars newly branded for Southern Pacific, Chicago and North Western and Missouri Pacific. The common thread is that they're all UP which jealously guards its corporate imagery and that of its constituent roads. From a legal and financial monetizing point of view, not heritage or railfan perspective.

[Glorious NSE]

Again if you're looking at a specific railroad and specific time though you need to work out what they did at that time and make sure you don't project practices from different era's or companies. This kind of thing is a huge subject and with railroads operating for hundreds of years, with hundreds of corporate organisations involved, in many and varied financial situations there are lots of potential things that a given railroad might do.

 

BN didn't appear to do lots of patching of freightcars to BN marks. In fact in many cases where numbers have needed to be renewed due to fading or damage but the car wasn't painted the existing pre-merger number and marks was reapplied - in a BN font!

 

They did patch all pre-merger loco's and cabooses to BN though and so far as I can tell they did so within a couple of months of the start of BN - but as I said earlier they had a very active repaint program that worked through the entire loco fleet within 7 years, in fact from merger in 1970 it gets difficult to find non-green road loco's on trains from around 1974 if you start digging through pics...cabooses on the other hand while wearing BN numbers on patches seem a common enough sight in pre-merger schemes well into the 80s.

 

Compare with Conrail formed in 1976 - they patched loco's very quickly just as BN did, but their loco's took years to get Conrail blue, not helped I guess by them being essentially a collection of bankrupt railroads from the off. But by comparison it seems that Conrail's first act was to refurbish the majority of their cabooses. You can easily find shots of (for example) GN painted cabooses carrying BN patches in the mid 80s. Try that with Penn Central, or Erie Lackawanna cabooses?

 

Compare/Contrast with modern railroads. BNSF is now circa 16 years old and still has lots of loco's in pre-merger paint - in fact i'd wager they will have retired more loco's in pre-merger paint than repainted them. BNSF's loco's I *think* now are all patched but that process didn't start in earnest for several years after the merger unlike BN in the 70s which had that tied up almost from day one. UP is a similar age and has been actively patching units as well but again took several years to start that process - repaints? Just like the BNSF they aren't that common.

 

BN in the 70s did also *actively* repaint and renumber rolling stock, they didn't just wait to repaint it when it was rebuilt which is what tends to happen these days, and when something was repainted the rolling stock was absorbed into the BN marks and their number series unlike (for instance) on the modern UP. The 70s BN merger had pre-allocated numbers for every loco and item of rolling stock mapped out to ensure this worked - even loco's that lasted barely a month or two (like their sole FT unit) under BN ownership still had an allocated BN number.

 

When they merged the Frisco in 1980 I think things were a little different. BN was huge compared to the Frisco and it seems that the red and white on loco's dissapeared much quicker than even the 70s merger, but my impression is that with a global recession kicking in at the same time that time repaints on freightcars across the whole US network was slowing - culls on older liveries at this point would have been more linked to scrapping older redundant stock than giving it shiny new paint...I think there are still some Frisco freightcars running nowadays for example.

 

That same 1980-ish recession also seems to have been a real killer of 40' cars as well, unless a particular traffic *needed* a 40' boxcar specifically...

[Sir Ray]

That same 1980-ish recession also seems to have been a real killer of 40' cars as well, unless a particular traffic *needed* a 40' boxcar specifically...

That early 1980s US recession (actually a double dip recession 1980 & 1981-1982 that really affected heavy industry across the US, not just the 'Rust-Belt' of the Northeast & Midwest which had been suffering since the late 1960s), plus a change in freight car incentives around the time, clobbered those 1970s colorful short-line boxcars fleets as IPD investments (incentive-per-diem, meaning the short-line would get increased lease fees) - initially lots of nearly new 50ft outside-post boxcars were stashed on out-of-the way sidings, and allegedly one shortline (Bonhomie & Hattiesburg Southern) had more cars to store than they had track to store them on. Eventually many of those boxcars were sold to larger railroads (and had patched reporting marks) - heck, even Railbox boxcars were sold off as excess (this is a second generation patch to MRL, previously UP I think owned it from Railbox).

This thread on a different board illustrates some Shortline IPD liveries (although the Turtle Creek one is fictious, the others aren't), and I see I had to chime in on that thread with my 2 pence...

 

As for roofwalks, the legislation was passed in 1966, and new cars were manufactured without roofwalks starting that year, but lots of railroads got exemptions to removing the roofwalks for years afterward (as was mentioned above, I believe some exemptions lasted into the 1980s when many of those older boxcars were scrapped due to the glut of the stored newer boxcars). BTW, just in case it wasn't clear, if the boxcar had roof hatches or other roof mounted appurtenances, roofwalks were allowed (just like they are on covered hoppers w/ roof hatches)

 

I posted an image in some other thread of a 1965 SP 86ft Hi-Cube Autoparts boxcar (Massive, Plate F I think), with roofwalks - yay, found it!

[Mike Boucher]

Here's another example. The Boston and Maine, while it still exists on paper, became "Guilford Tranportation" in 1983. Guilford became "Pan Am Railways" about 4 or 5 years ago.

 

There are still pieces of frieght stock rolling around Massachusetts in Boston and Maine paint. For example, there are some 2 bay covered hoppers in cement service which I see fairly regularly, still in their B&M blue, but with a lot of cement dust weathered down over the sides.

 

You can see one here: http://newenglanddep...llingstock.html, 4th picture in the center column. That picture is from 2006, but I saw a bunch of them in a train just a month or so ago. So, we're looking at somewhere around 30 years between paint jobs on those cars.

 

There are still more than a few locos painted in Guilford colors rolling around. Locos get repainted regularly, boxcars less so, but the Pan Am boxcars are becoming more and more common...

[CraigZ]

'Southern' box cars, albeit 50' cars, are still as common as can be...and the Southern's been gone since 1982. Some have gotten NS reporting marks restenciled on them, but not all. Cars with SCL reporting marks are still around, albeit much more scarce. More common are SCL covered hoppers with CSXT reporting marks.

[CraigZ]

And this photo showed up today, taken by John Jones, um, yesterday. I only wish I could read the build date on the thing, but the C&O For Progress herald went out of use about 35-40 years ago as best as I can tell!