Last year I visited the Utah Railroad Museum at Ogden Union Station. I photographed an odd-looking railcar at the far end of the yard, all by itself except for some piles of parts. It looks to be from the 19th century, all wood construction, truss rods, arch bar trucks, and a peeling coat of UP Armour Yellow and a red stripe along the sill. It’s short, I’d guess maybe 36 feet long. At one end is an open vesibule with locomotive-style ladder/steps below. In the center of the side is a large sliding door typical of a boxcar. At the other end, flush with the end and sides of the car, is a short cupola, with very narrow windows looking back over the roof. There are no windows anywhere on the side, and the far end isn’t visable in the photo. There is also a man-sized door on the side allowing entry to the cupola, with ladder steps below it. (The bottom of this door is about two feet above the sill.)
I’ve never seen anything like it. Any ideas how it was used?
It’s at the south end of the yard. There is single-story yellow brick building with a flat roof and green tinted windows on the east side of it. I found another photo of the car on my PC, and in that photo you can see it’s backed up against an iron fence, with a large empty lot on the other side. What I assume is Wall Ave is visable in the distance. If you’re in the neighborhood, the car should be clearly visable from outside the museum.
The second photo, which shows the north end of the car (the end with the cupola), shows that the car does in fact have windows. (The openings are sealed with plywood, and the one in the side is almost invisable). There is one window on the side of the cupola, about a foot wide and two feet tall, wedged in between the door and the end of the car. The are also three large windows in the north-facing end of the car.
I can e-mail photos if anyone would like to see them.
I know exactly which car you are referring to - I’ll do some digging and see what I can find out. It looks to me like a custom job of some kind. The museum there received a batch of Air Force railroad equipment and a few other unique pieces.
Did they get those B-52 simulator cars that were sitting somewhere in UT (Mountain Home?)? I always wanted to see the insides of those things. I believe they had some KC-135 simulator cars as well.
AFAK the simulator cars are gone. The electronics and displays were pulled out years ago and the cars themselves were scrapped sometime last year as the museum trimmed it’s collection to a more manageable (and affordable) size. I am still working on getting infor on the “curious car”.
I still have not found out what it is but I’m sorry to report it is now in worse shape than these picutures show. UP railroad spotted some cars on the wrong track a few weeks ago. Instead of coupling to some other cars, the cars rolled down the track that the yellow car is on, took out the fence in the background and slammed this car against another car in the museum. Since the yellow car is made of wood, it came out second.
I was down in Ogden for the annual Hostler’s show, and This old buy I was with told me what it was, but I had forgotten. So I emailed him with a link to your photo and he replied:
that is the basic box of a wedge (or maybe rotary) narrow gauge snowplow. The high part on the front is to be able to see over the plow. probably built from a side door caboose (rear end platform suggests so. side doors were kept so the crew could clear the plow in case of jams(logs, rocks, cows and ducks(lol)
It is indeed a snowplow, although Standard gauge not narrow. Built by the U.S. Navy over a tender frame at the Clearfield Naval Supply Depot (now the Freeport Center) in Utah. Later purchased by the Heber Creeper Railroad, where it was converted to a power car and given its yellow paint (the old HVRR color). When the Heeber Creeper went out of business and Heber Valley took over, the car was donated to the Utah State Railroad Museum.
