does anybody know what the dimensions are of a 40 foot boxcar?
Which one? They vary by several feet in height and several inches in length and width. there is also a difference in interior and exterior length.
Dave H.
a 40 foot regular boxcar
It could range from 8 ft to 12 ft high inside, from 40 to 40’ 6’ long inside and from 8’ 6" to 9’ 4’ wide inside.
Boxcars from the 1930’s tended to be 10 ft or less high inside, boxcars in the 40’s and 50’s tended to be 10’6" high inside and boxcars built in the 60’s or later were 10’ 6" or higher inside.
Dave H.
Dave’s pretty well got this one nailed. The universal inside length was 40’6" (cars with smaller lengths were out there, but those usually had modified interiors taking up that extra half foot).
If I’m not mistaken, Pullman Standard’s PS-1 box cars (probably the most common design from 1948 through the mid-to-late 1950s) had an inside length of 40’6", an inside width of 9’2", and an inside height of 10’6".
Cars with an inside height taller than 10’6" were relatively uncommon, usually for special loads. A good-sized bunch of these cars were built during the late 1960s for appliance service, and a few hundred were built for special service on the Southern Pacific in the mid-1970s. Those SP cars (often relettered for lines which leased them from Greenbrier under the “Golden West Service” name) are about the only 40-footers you’ll find in active service today.
Outside dimensions are more problematic–you’d have to consult an Equipment Register to get some good examples. Length was usually somewhere from 44 to 46 feet, width was from 10’ up to 10’8" (the universal clearance plate maximum), and height was in the 14-15-foot range for a normal car. Of course, the same car could have a different height later in its career if they removed the roof walkway.
All my life I judged everything by a 40 foot boxcar( lived in a railway town) but not till now did I realize they were @ 10 feet high, so what length are boxcars now??? 60 feet more??? c’mon now --an average guys (and yes, there is an average)
Methinks you’ll find the average general service boxcar coming in at around 50’ nowadays.
Already gave him that. They range from 8 to 11 or 12 ft high inside, from 39 to 40 ft long inside and from 9 to 10 ft wide inside.
They made 40 ft boxcars for over 75 years. Its like asking what size is a sedan.
Dave H.
The word “average” is not a good one, because some 50-footers and some 60-footers have been among the most recent ones built, and the “average” would probably be something like 58.4 feet, a totally meaningless figure.
Perhaps “typical” is better.
Just about all recent box cars have been of the high-roof variety, with an inside height around 12 feet or so. Most of them have an inside length of just over 60 feet, though quite a few have been built with an inside length of 50’6". That, by the way, was the inside length of virtually everything built during the box car boom of the mid-1970s through 1980. There were a few hundred built to an oddball length of 52’6" or so (as precise as I can be without a trip to the dungeon), as well as a few 60-footers.
The hi-cube auto parts box cars haven’t been built in any quantity since the mid-1970s. One group was built recently, and another single car–narrower and taller–was built a few years back and not duplicated. These cars are on their way out, due to their age–and you’ll probably not see them repeated. But all of the hi-cube cars had an interior length of 86’6", and most of them had a capacity of 10,000 (exactly!) cubic feet.
Not so meaningless when trying to figure out just how large a dimension is, the 40 foot length impregnated in my mind has become very useful all my life and I’ve come pretty close at estimating lengths now, so today I will try and use the 50 to 60 foot method, remember these are very rough guesses at a measured distance and. well I still know how far 40 feet is.