Hi,
I’m doing an inventory of my layout. When it comes to boxcars, I also want to list the type of door on the car.
Does anyone know where I can find this info, with photos, showing the different types of boxcar doors?
You might have more success limiting the choices to plug door or sliding, and if the latter, steel or wood, and single, double or door-and-a-half. Another option to include would be the width, an important consideration for shippers. There were/are probably hundreds of proprietary doors, with nuances that called for a name different from other, very similar, doors.
Wayne
How many cars do you have? I have “rather a lot” and find that subdividing the boxcars as follows works…
Car length – 40’, 50’ . 50’+. 60’ and 89’
Roof type – flat. ridged and rounded.
Doors – single, double, quad – I’ve never bothered to make seperate pages for plug doors and ordinary but that would be possible.
Insulated, reefer and Hi Cube cars get their own pages, The Hi Cubes do get sub-divided by length and doors as before.
Length, roof and number of doors shows up most easily. Then I note the RR or owner and the road number.
That has worked fine for the last fifteen years. [8D]
Do you mean Superior Doors vs Youngstown Doors versus P-S doors? The differences are largely appearance. It might help to identify a car i suppose, or more accurately model a car if you learned you used the wrong door (remember the Walthers boxcar kits that offered a choice?)
Or do you mean differences that would matter to a shipper? That actually makes sense and could add interest to operations since not just any empty would be delivered to just any shipper. From a practical standpoint, a shipper ordering a car might specify sliding door versus plug door, double door versus single door, and then might specify door width. The old 6 foot doors would hardly acccomodate a fork lift for example. 12 ft door would.
Again I am not exactly sure what you are getting at here but my hunch is you mean what would matter to a shipper in which case it is a good idea if integrated into your operations.
Dave Nelson