Another Exciting Round of What Is It?

Trains Magazine General Discussion
1

I was down in Fort Valley, GA over the weekend and I saw SOU 992452. I don’t have my pictures online yet, but I did find this:

http://www.northeast.railfan.net/rolling15.html

At the link above, they list is as being one of two covered flat cars. So, what is a covered flat car? Why was this used and how? It appears that it is used for MoW now.

2

It looks like those special cars that Boeing uses to ship their parts out to their assembly plant.

3

According to

http://southern.railfan.net/sou_mow_roster.html

this is [part of] a “100 Ton Ballast Cleaner”

The sister car, 992453, is listed on

http://southern.railfan.net/equip/mow.html

as “a 100-ton hopper converted into a ballast cleaner”; it’s in the North Carolina Transportation Museum along with ballast cleaner BCC-6W and the specialized trash hoppers it used (although I see no evidence it was a working part of that ballast-cleaning system). A picture is here:

http://trackgang.railfan.net/images/spencer/cars/ball.jpg

I’ll be delighted to find out more about how this thing actually works.

4

Wow, thanks for the links. I didn’t come up with any of them. The one with the crane is even more interesting!

I’m not sure that it was part of a ballast cleaner however. It was SOU 1750 in 1966, when it was built, according to the one link that I found. I got the impression that it was originally in revenue service. Also, it was a specially built flat car. Magor was the company that built it. So I don’t think that it is a converted hopper car.

I wonder if this one used to have a crane like its sister car. It appeared that I had recently missed a bunch of MoW down there. They had crew bunk trailors, and tons of rail, ties, and misc other stuff in a staging area down the tracks.

Hopefully someone else can shed some more light on it.

5

I just read over on that trackgang site, where you found the information on it being a converted hopper originally. I wish I could find a copy of that book, to see if it says anything else. I also think that this book might be helpfull as well.

http://www.signaturepress.com/mgrrev.html

Perhaps Magor converted it in 1966, and didn’t build a new one.

Edit: Ok, one last thing. Looking at the entire train…
http://trackgang.railfan.net/images/spencer/cars/sou-mw.html
My guess is that it is used to assemble the conveyers or some other parts. Maybe it carries the conveyers durring moves or something as well. Also it is interesting to see that the sister one is in a museum and this one may actually still be in some sort of MoW service.

Just guessing here. I’ll email Tom from that site and see what he says.

6

that was a quick Q and A session…

7

Yeah, I guess that I should finish searching before responding. At least this way you can see my notes lol.

8

I, for one, am waiting with great expectation to see how the thing works.

I also ENJOY reading sequential posts that show the progress of search and research. For one thing, it shows enthusiasm; for another, it shows useful details – who would guess, for example, that two Google searches on the same thing would give completely separate hits…

9

From Tom Daspit, the creater of one of the above sites:

10

http://southern.railfan.net/ties/1962/62-9/new9.jpg

This photo is from 1962. Does anyone know if Southern was having a shipper’s display or some kind of “fair” to show off new equipment?