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.
What I’m getting at is that presumiably other Class 1 coal trains worked on the J and CRL… and BRC / maybe CHT to get round/into Chicago…? This would help solve my issue. Presumably other cities had the same thing happen?
Also I’m thinking in terms of run throughs, bridge traffic and last-leg-of-the-journey to access a power plant… with or without foriegn power on the point in the last case. (I notice that foriegn power on CNW had to be piloted by CNW locos equipt with cab signals where cab signalling was in force).
Put another way… How do I explain those lovley strings of someone else’s coal hoppers? (Apart from the fact that in my world they run where I send them [:P])
That’s one of the nice things about interchange and transfer runs: you don’t HAVE to know what those cars are doing there. So long as it’s plausable it’ll be fine. Remember, most cars on “antique” railroads were just passing through: there were so many roads that interchange and bridge routing was inevetable. So just run the cars you want from one staging yard to the other; if anyone asks about them, say it’s bridge traffic “from her to there. My road just moves 'em.”
I can’t factually explain what a US Navy helium tank car is doing running between Peoria, IL and Frankfort, IN, but I’ve got three different photos and one bad order report that says that they did do so. I “suspect” that it was heading from California to Indiana to get refilled, but there are neither blimp pens nor helium refineries on my mainline. But I’ve got a helium tank car on my roster nonetheless, just because it really ran on my modeled line!
Examples like this are all over the place. What’s a single SFRD reefer doing in a string of N&W hoppers in Virginia? What’s one empty N&W hopper doing on Donner Pass? Nobody knows, but you can still model it!
With the difficulty in finding the correct equipment for every square foot of our model railroads, we’re becoming too PC (prototypically correct, that is), and it can be discouraging. Your post is exactly what I needed, and I hope that folks who have yet to take the plunge into model railroading will accept this as fact, and embrace the hobby! [2c]