At a swap meet a few week ago I found a copy of the May 1971 “Freight Inspector’s Manual” of the AAR, although my copy was copied and bound for station agents of the Chicago & North Western (in my case, the agent at Lorimor Iowa, south and west of Des Moines). It has interesting information of potential use to the modeler. It has 254 page plus a 20 page supplement on shipping of and inspection of damages to major household appliances.
The intent of the book was to instruct how cars as well as TOFC were to be loaded but more to the point, how to evaluate damaged loads from the standpoint of assigning responsibility. It is a compendium of the wrong and right way to load, secure, and brace all sorts of loads. For the modeler the takeaways are many.
If you model a factory or shipping business, there should be supplies of lumber, timbers, steel strapping or wire, bracing, paper and reinforced door interiors, and various forms of filler. And workers whose jobs involved loading and bracing.
If you model a receiving business, the above material could be piled up as discarded waste. It had to go somewhere.
If you have open box car doors, or open trailer ends, you’d want the visible loads to be packed, stacked, and braced as shown in this book.
Another thing the book details is the various kinds of industrial loading trucks beyond the ordinary fork lift. 14 variants are shown – you’d need to kitbash to get them.
The supplement on appliances makes an interestint point – appliances do not go from factory to retail store as a rule and it details the distribution chain – “a total of 20 exposures to possible damage.” This suggests some modeling beyond the factory: in-transit warehouses, area distributors and dealer warehouses.
I don’t know how common copies of this sort of book are but I thought it was ten bucks well spent.
Dave Nelson