I have alway been interested in thease gondolas. I have BN, Algoma Centreal, IC and a few others. I have seen them hauling various things such as coiled steel, scap metal and even pulpwood but never could figure out what the purpose of thease cars were and why they were built in the first place when the gondola, pulpwood and regular bulkhead flat already existed? Any idea?
Better equipment utilization. Most of the pulp cars we have don’t have any floors. We did take some pulp cars out of pulp service and put them into steel service but we installed cradles to hold coiled steel. We did not remove the end bulkheads. These are the Algoma central cars you have seen.
Many of the Eastern roads used them to haul pipe. With the bulkheads it could be stacked higher without danger of shifting.
My guess is to insure the cargo loaded on the cars does not shift back & forth. [:I][:D]
[quote]
Originally posted by Junctionfan
Most of the pipe that I see gets put into bulkhead flats with side stakes. The bulkhead gondolas I see usually carry steel slabs and plate steel stacked so high with wooden blocks as spacers. Used to see them all the time at Niagara Steel Fabrication.
I wish all fixed-end gondolas had bulkheads! They would eliminate a lot of in-train placement problems.
I’ve always thought that pipe was the intended commodity for cars like these, but then I don’t live in pulpwood country. Sure, a bulkhead flat could haul the same thing (probably better, in the case of pulpwood flats with their sloping floors), but in an ideal world you could load something else, like scrap, into the gondola for the return trip.