Can anyone out there tell me when and why the railroads started doing away with their standard 85’ baggage cars and adopting the shorter ones ?.
Thanks
trainluver1
Actually, from what I’ve found in researching several roads, is that the opposite is true. Railroads started out with 40’-50’ baggage cars in the late 1800s, went to 70’ cars around the turn of the century, dropped down to 60’ cars, and then started buying longer cars again before the Depression. By the streamliner era, baggage cars (but not RPOs) were as long as any coach (70’-80’).
I’ve noticed a lot of streamliners of the 1940s and 50s used the shorter baggage cars, as did Santa Fe on the Super Chief and also Union Pacific on their “city of” trains. If you’ll notice, the UP passenger car sets put out by Kato have these shorter baggage cars included.
“Thanks”
trainluver1
Those “streamliners” aren’t typical of post-steam passenger trains. If you were to figure out how many trains ran on October 18th, 1962, you’d find that the vast majority of the trains ran with LOTS of headend equipment, of many different makes. The majority of those cars were mail-storage cars of the 70-76 foot range.
The UP and ATSF streamliners you’re looking at work in much the same way as modern airliners did; your baggage doesn’t ride with you. It’s in another train heading in the same direction. Fast name trains mostly carried high price, quick delivery items, and so didn’t need much in the way of baggage space.