On my western-themed layout, how prototypical would a string of coal hoppers from, say, The NKP, be? Or would The Great Northern send their own hoppers back east to pick up loads of coal?
In a couple of word - not very, although that’s not to say it never happened.
Back in the day GN, for example, served on-line coal mines, as did UP, MILW, CB&Q, D&RGW, and ATSF. Some of these mines were captive operations, i.e. railroad-owned, while others were not. If you can find copies of the Keystone Coal Manual from the 1950s and 60s, you can look at the mine directories for the states in which you are interested. Not only are the mine properties described, the railroads that serve(d) them are listed as well. This will give you a good idea of who did what.
Hope this helps.
work safe
Coalminer3’s comments are dead on.
This didn’t happen because there was VERY little coal that crossed the Mississippi from east to west (or vice versa) by rail before the 1970s, except for southern Illinois coal moving to St. Louis. Further, railroads strove very hard to load nothing but their home-road cars at mines they served, with the small exception of some privately owned cars (which were pretty rare in coal service before the 1970s) and some seasonal events. Further, coal was all loose-car until the advent of unit-train coal (on the B&O) in 1958, and unit train moves even by the mid-1960s totalled about 60 nationwide. So there weren’t strings of coal cars per se.
You could see some occasional foreign-road hoppers moving things like foundry coke traveling far off-line.
In the west, you would commonly see Utah Railway and Rio Grande drop-bottom gons delivering coal deep into UP, SP, and WP territory and occasionally up into NP and GN territory in the Far West, and UP drop-bottom gons and hoppers on WP and SP territory. Very little coal moved to California because it had a surfeit of fuel oil, except to Kaiser Steel and foundries. A lot of coal backhauled in ore boats to Duluth, Green Bay, Milwaukee, and Chicago, and moved by rail inland on NP, GN, MILW, CB&Q, C&NW, etc., in home-road cars.
Coal sources in the West that shipped heavy amounts by rail in the 1950s would be:
Wyoming, UP
Utah, D&RGW and URY
Colorado, D&RGW, C&S, and UP
Kansas, KCS, SLSF, and MP
Missouri, SLSF, MP
Arkansas, SLSF, KCS, MP
Montana, NP, MILW
Oklahoma, CRI&P, KCS, MKT
New Mexico, AT&SF
The typical coal move rarely exceeded 300 miles!
S. Hadid
How about Washington/Oregon, esp. the Colombia River gorge? Thinking of doing UP along there…
Brian Pickering
Depends on era. Washington was a significant coal producer (Cle Elum, Centralia) in the early 1900s but by the 1940s its coal production was very low. A lot of D&RGW, UP, and URY originated coal moved into eastern Oregon and Washington for home heating and steam-generation at industrial customers such as sugar refineries, but as you approached the coast, fuel oil from California predominated as the heating and steam-generation fuel.
I wonder if this is why Broadway Limited has a tendency to release ATSF steam locomotives with oil tenders? Prior to conversion to oil, where would the ATSF have obtained their coal?
Santa Fe was ordering coal-fired locomotives at least as late as 1938. Coal sources on Santa Fe included the Osage Field in Kansas and the Raton and Gallup Fields in New Mexico.
And central Illinois; never forget central Illinois, which was the location of the ATSF’s charter line. The ATSF had several coaling stations through the state, and all the coal was local (off the C&IM, C&NW and Milwaukee)
WOW! Great stuff! [:D]
Just one problem…
I held off getting (coal) hoppers for my 80s just-west-of-Chicago model for ages figuring that boxcars, covered hoppers and tankcars would dominate… but then I stumbled on a pile of Bowser ATSF hoppers with unique numbers and a fairly late build date. I’m a sucker of strings of the same or very similar cars… so… how do I explain non-unit trains of hoppers?
Presumiably strings of the big coal gons coming out of the Powder River will be okay? (I hope)!
If they don’t carry coal would they load or bakload aggregate for highway construction?
TIA [8D]
Hey, I’m having the same type of problem! I also like to see long strings of similar cars. So, I started buying Walthers 26’ Ore Cars only to find out that they NEVER carried coal. Now, I want to find the right coal hoppers, but I can’t use eastern roads! What’s a guy to do? [;)]
Actually, the movement of eastern coal to the west coast was a little more active than most people think. True, it probably amounted to no more than ten cars a day total, but it still did happen often enough to notice. It’s fun watching UP/SP/ATSF fans debate the frequency of N&W hoppers travelling over Raton or Donner!
This section is dead on. I’ve only got one comment though: watch your car types. We modeler tend to carry a LOT of incorrect baggage around with us regarding how “antique” railroading looked. We’re so used to seeing long strings of black and brown hoppers crawling their way along the N&W and Pennsy that we tend to think that that’s how coal was moved everywhere. NOT TRUE. Shockingly, before about 1955 most coal west of the Mississippi, and actually west of Indiana, moved by GONDOLA. Drop-bottom or “GS” (general service) gons, usually.
I’ve taken all the roads listed and given their appropriate numbers of gondolas and hoppers for 1950 below. I’ve added seven other western roads including the SP, WP, and GN:
UP: 4506 gons (3342 GS), 7929 hoppers
D&RGW: 5366 gons (4710 GS, all marked as “coal cars”), 0 hoppers
URY: 14 GS gons
C&S: 1332 gons (1312 GS), 298 hoppers
CB&Q (C&S parent): 9464 gons (7552 GS), 6624 hoppers
KCS: 570 gons (188 GS), 250 hoppers
SLSF: 5301 gons (392 GS), 4256 hoppers
MP (and affiliates): 7307 gons (2830 GS), 9204 hoppers
NP: 3815 gons (all GS), 1393 hoppers
MILW: 11,443 gons (10,958 GS), 3971 hoppers
CRI&P: 5636 gons (3729 GS), 831 hoppers
MKT: 1256 gons (63 GS), 800 hoppers
AT&SF: 11,464 gons (7714 GS), 3869 hoppers (about half side dumps for stone service)
Add to this 2,000 UCR (Utah Coal Route) drop-bottom gons, owned 50-50 by UP and Utah Railway.
Rio Grande also moved a lot of coal in boxcars as late as the Korean War. Most Colorado and Utah mines were equipped with box-car loading machinery. A lot of customers liked to get the high-priced lump coal in boxcars because they served as a theft-proof storage container both en-route and while the car was parked on their spur, finding it cheaper to pay the demurrage while the coal was slowly dispensed by the wagon- or truck-load than to build a storage facility and hire a guard to keep the coal from disappearing every night. Rio Grande liked it because it was a nice income source for per diem and demurrage.
The midwest coal roads, particularly the Illinois and Indiana coal roads (CB&Q, MILW) moved a lot of coal in hoppers because they had large industrial customers in Chicago and the other Great Lakes industrial cities. But the Far West coal roads, with the exception of UP, were almost pure drop-gon roads until the late 1950s.
Late 1980s – there would be lots of utility coal moving in mostly steel cars, both rotary-dump gons and standard cross hoppers. You’d see a lot of private-owner cars, but as a rule, foreign-road cars are going to be scarce. That is, on BN you would see BN cars but not UP cars; on UP you would see UP cars but not BN cars, and so forth.
You can use a standard cross hopper for aggregate if you don’t load it more than about 1/2 full. Gravel rarely moves very far by rail; there are a lot of 50-mile aggregate moves but almost none that travel further. Because you would have to clean the hopper both ways for a coal headhaul with an aggregate backhaul (power plants don’t like stones in their coal-handling machinery and concrete doesn’t like coal dust as an admixture), backhaul moves in a coal headhaul are quite rare except for commodities that move a long distance such as taconite pellets.
S. Hadid
I did a search for drop-bottom gons at Walthers, and there were only 4 in stock - all from different roads! Why is it that this type of gon is so hard to find? Wouldn’t the GS gons have to be manually unloaded, namely by “shovel”?
The GS gon was a drop-bottom gon. But back in those days unloading by shovel wasn’t uncommon. Labor was cheap.
Model railroad manufacturers have rarely attempted the GS gon in plastic because the car is very complex. Details West makes an excellent kit of an SP prototype, which is both relatively expensive and difficult to build because there are so many little parts. It’s a huge problem for those of us who want to model Rio Grande.
S. Hadid
Red Caboose offers/offered them in a variety of road names with at least three different ends, steel-sided and composite, with and without side extensions. They never seem to be in stock as kits, though…
[edit]…Rio Grande GS is shown as a future release in kit and RTR on their web site.
Yes, the four I found in a search at Walthers were by Red Caboose, and they’re not that cheap. Given they’re four different road names, and the price, and I will probably stick with hoppers for now.
In “The Northern Pacific of McGee and Nixon” it’s mentioned in one caption that virtually every freight train going west - stock train, reefers, whatever - would be filled out with gondolas of rosebud coal going east, mostly for on-line use by NP engines.
FWIW the M-St.L hauled coal out of coal mines in Illinois and Iowa.
I’m confused… how does a westbound freight get filled out with coal going east?