Imagine it’s early to mid 1950’s, a small portion of a mid size town is modeled, businesses include the need for flat cars, box cars, reefers, depressed center heavy duty flat, gondolas, coal hoppers, and possibly hoppers although it’s looking like that won’t occur. It’s all freelancing what I think would be called a short line, but I want it to be prototypical. I found a friggen *&$% load of info, a pretty big roster of Milwaukee Road cars . Would 60’ flat cars, bulk head cars, 50’ combo door box’s, Russel plow, rotary plow, wedge plow, snow flanger, wood floor gondola, or steel floor gondola be unrealistic for my era?
The list is awesome. It lncluded some pictures but gave me series numbers, number of cars made, and AAR codes for single door box cars of 40 and 50 foot, 40 and 50 foot rib side boxs, 40 and 50 foot reefers, the combo door box mentioned above, 50 and 60 foot flat cars, 60 foot bulk head flat cars, 54 and 52 foot gondolas, some cranes, short and long hoppers, ballast and ore cars, cupola and bay window cabooses, the plows mentioned, and even a few things I already knew wouldn’t be era correct like 86 foot boxs and auto carriers. It even listed some odd cars like tool cars, bridge building cars, and a few more but no real info on them. I think I’m starting to enjoy doing the research [:D]
A key resource would be a copy of The Official Railway Equipment Register from the approximate time that you model. These are available at some train shows and likely show up on-line. This reference lists all the freight cars opearated by the railroads and private car companies, so one copy from your era will be all that is needed. Numbers, AAR car type, dimensions, and capacity are shown (but not photos).
Generally in the fifties you’re looking at 40-50’ cars. 40’ and 50’ single and doubledoor boxcars with 10’ height began production in the mid-late thirties. Reefers would generally still be 40’ long with most having wood sides. Many would be iced cars but mechanical ones were replacing them. But some woodside iced reefers lasted into the sixties or very early seventies. BTW some steel / iced reefers were made but I believe any woodside reefer you saw would be iced only.
One thing to remember with boxcars is that all-steel cars were pretty much the standard from the 1920’s on for new car construction…however during WW2 steel was rationed, so many new boxcars were built with steel roof, ends and underframe, but wood sides. So in the early fifties you might see a basically new 10’ high woodsided boxcar running next to a thirty year old 8’ high all steel box.
A 40’ bulkhead flat like say the old Walthers one or the Athearn pulpwood flat would be fine in a 1950’s layout, you might see a 50’ flat with bulkheads. 50’ flats were sometimes used in the fifties for piggyback operations with one larger trailer or two small ones.
In any era or time, a depressed center flat would be pretty rare…I mean, they existed back at least to the twenties, but would be a “specialty” car only used for certain loads. What industry do you have that would be using one regularly??
Many coal dealers (if that’s what the ‘coal hoppers’ are for) preferred to get coal in gondolas rather than hopper cars.
…and a few even in box cars. Also, I’ve seen photos of cattle cars with roof hatches for shipping coal and/or coke.
I suppose box cars would be handy for protecting the coal from freezing. Perhaps dealers payed demurrage and used the box cars to store coal until sold to the consumer.
Cattle-car use was seasonal, and undoubtedly imagination was used to increase their utilization.
Way back (100 years ago) coal was normally shipped in sacks in boxcars. I remember a pic a year or two back in I think the NP Hist. Soc. mag on coal shipping in / out of Superior WI. The pic shows coal coming in by lake boat from the east, all the cars being loaded are boxcars.
Stock cars were also good for transporting creosoted railroad ties - the fumes wouldn’t build up like in a boxcar, but they still be somewhat protected from rain and snow.
A Car Builder’s Cyclopedia from your era would be a good investment. remember that freight cars can have a useful life of almost 40 years, so a 1950s freight consist might include cars dating back to the 1920s provide the applicances – brake systems, underframe, trucks etc – were up to date.
There were still plenty of wood outside braced boxcars in the 1950s. Also steel cars with 50’ cars being fairly common but the basic 40’ boxcar whether steel or wood sided was very common. An excellent article in March 1986 Model Railroader should be consulted: “Boxcar Fleet of the Fifties.”
What I remember was the big differences in car heights one would see even in a train mostly made up of boxcars. Some of the 1930s boxcars were very low comapared to the PS-1s of the 50s.
The main thing to remember is that so much of what we now see on or in specialized cars, from automibiles to sand to grain to lumber, was shipped in boxcars back then.
Flatcars – some 40’ flats were seen but the 53’ foot flat was pretty well established by then. The Proto 2000 flatcar in HO is a good choice. There were some bulkhead flats in use.
Reefers – this began the decade of change for reefers, still plenty with ice bunkers (some steel, some wood) but mechanical reefers began to be seen because foods were beginning to be truly frozen, not just chilled. Not too many mechanical reefers however – mostly ice bunker reefers.
Tanks cars – mostly the 36 to 40’ ones with frames, and some were riveted construction.
Hoppers – relatively few wood outside braced hoppers such as the P2K war emergency hoppers were still around, or rather they were but mostly the wood was replaced by steel. But even into the 1960s you’d still see a wood outside braced hopper.
Covered hoppers were mostly short and used for dry bulk commodities, not grain as today with the Center Flos – those are
That’s kind of a stretch. I would agree with the statement that it was common to ship coal in boxcars, but can’t sign up for coal was normally shipped in boxcars. I would be willing to bet that for every boxcar load of coal there were at least a thousand loads of coal in hoppers and gondolas. Now it may be that at Superior, WI coal normally moved in boxcars but at other locations it was much less common. Between the Pennsy, B&O, N&W, RDG, L&N, SOU and IC there were over a hundred thousand hoppers and gons devoted to hauling coal full time all the time.
Continuing Mr. Nelson’s thread. Gondolas would be in 3 major groups, 40 ft gons, especially in the west where the “GS” drop bottom gon was used instead of hopper cars for coal. The 46 ft USRA gon and its clones. The 52 ft 6 in mill gon with drop or solid ends was the “new” standard gondola, especially in the steel trades. Your longest cars would be gondolas, since most railroads that served steel mills customers that used steel had some 60 or 65 ft gons.
A particular railroad’s car fleet mix is related to the traffic it carries. As such, the mix of cars one might see on a particular railroad can differ significantly from another. For example, in 1950 hopper cars represented 23 percent of railroad-owned cars (these statistics omit privately-owned cars consisting mostly of refrigerator and tank cars), but the Baltimore & Ohio, being a heavy coal hauler, had 50 percent hoppers. Not usual for a western railroad, the Great Northern had 26 percent hoppers. Most other western railroads eschewed hoppers in favor of gondolas: the Southern Pacific had 3 percent hoppers but 20 percent gondolas, and the Western Pacific had 5 percent hoppers and 22 percent gondolas.
Western railroads also had a very high ratio of box cars. Compared to the national average of 36 percent, the Southern Pacific, Great Northern, and Western Pacific had 57, 54, and 43 percent respectively.
The mix of foreign cars (cars of one railroad traveling on other railroads) would also depend on commodities, but box cars were the great “travelers” and the most likely seen. For instance, in the mid-twentieth century it appeared that around 90 percent of foreign cars traveling on the Southern Pacific were box cars, based on my unscientific sampling of published photographs.
In 1950, railroad-owned stock cars reprsented 2 percent of the fleet, but that too varied by region. Naturally, the western roads had more: 4, 5, and 14 percent respectively for the SP, GN, and WP. (I don’t have summarized info on ATSF, UP, NP, etc. and don’t want to spend hours/days summarizing equipment registers.)
“Outside braced” is a model railroad term. In the 1:1 world, they were known as “single sheathed.” Similarly, “roof walks” on railroad cars were known as “running boards.”
Remember the question was about a small town’s businesses, like a coal dealer. Of course coal coming from the mines was shipped in hopper cars, and if you counted tonnage the vast majority of it was shipped in hoppers or gondola cars. But my point was that 100 years ago, likely as not it reached the merchant that sold it to the consumer in bags shipped in a boxcar. That would be true for say flour too, a large baking company would get sacked flour via boxcar - not in covered hoppers as they later would.
(Course the question was really about 50-60 years ago, I just kinda got off on a sidetrack.[:I])
I model railroads 100 years ago and at least on the east coast, every town had one or more companies that sold coal and they dumped the coal out of the cars on a low trestle. I model the P&R (Philadelphia and Reading) which was the largest carrier of anthracite coal which was highly valued as a “consumer” coal. If we are talking 100 years ago then the only thing I would change is that more of it would move in gondolas than hoppers. Other than that, I would stand by my statements. Yes, coal was moved in boxcars but I would bet that for every ton of coal moved in a boxar there was a thousand tons moved in gondolas or hoppers. Flour is shipped in sacks and in boxcars because it had to stay dry and had to avoid contamination. Coal didn’t suffer those restrictions. All of the research on mines I’ve done, very few had loading docks for boxcars, most that loaded boxcars, loaded bulk poured into the cars and shoveled it out. The vast majority of the drawings or diagrams of coal dealers had coal dumps for unloading retail coal into bunkers. and wagons sold it door to door bulk, not bagged.
Well I’d have to dig out that article on the Superior coal shipping, but I suspect you’re right about the majority of coal being ‘bulk’ rather than bagged now that I think about it some more.
Oddly enough, I am aware of one situation where bagged coal was used to fuel steam locomotives!!
Vernon Smith in his book “One Man’s Locomotives” notes that when he was a fireman starting his career on the Mesabi Range in Minnesota in the late twenties, the mining company he worked for had several engine houses scattered around the mining area (to be close to the mine pits I guess) but with one central location for fuel and water. As a fireman, he would arrive early in the morning and begin filling the tender with water from a hose. Then he’d get the fire going. The company kept sacked coal at the engine house, so that the fireman could get enough of a fire going to get up enough steam to move the engine a mile or so to the main refueling area to load the tender with coal and water from a regular water tank.
This is going along with my original subject post, but I’ve recently picked up a pair of USRA 40 foot box cars. One is a C&NW single sheathed with a build date of 1918 and the other is a C M St. P & P (I think I left a letter out there) double sheathed with a 1919 build date. Would these be too old to be used in a late 40’s to mid 50’s era layout? I’m hoping not because I plan on doing a freelance RR based around the michigan/wisconsin border and I love the look of these cars. Now the only thing is my PS1 is dated for 1958. When did Pullman-Standard start making the PS1’s?
Up into the late 1960s a tannery near my house got raw hides in old single sheathed (yes I know the railroads did not call them outside braced boxcars but old habits die hard) boxcars – not war emergency but real antiques. I remember seeing a 1919 built date on one. Since I took no photos and did not know spotting features I cannot say it was a USRA car or not but that Blt 1919 date sticks in my mind very strongly. Almost as strong as the odor of those hide service cars.
An ad in Railway Age magazine for May 18, 1959 (p. 49) shows Standard Floor Protector installed in Green Bay & Western boxcar 8142 – a single sheathed car – and says it was installed 21 years ago “and no repairs have ever been required.” So the floor was installed around 1938 or before. And if I read my 1967 Railway Equipment Register correctly that car was still in service in '67. So yes single sheathed cars still ran in the 1950s and 60s.
A photo of CB&Q 2 bay hopper 194920, taken at Milwaukee’s Lakeside Power Plant by Don Degner in “the late 1960s” shows that wood side hoppers of the war emergency style were still in use at that late date, with the wood intact and looking pretty good (a sister car next to it is also wood but I cannot make out the number).
Many of the CNW/Omaha USRA woodsided boxcars were rebuilt with steel sides in the fifties. Having the cars with wood sides c.1950 would be fine, . Heck, I can recall seeing woodsided boxcars in the sixties. Woodsided reefers would outnumber steel ones in 1950…although the ‘billboard’ lettering wasn’t allowed anymore
Things don’t change all that quick - I have pics I took in 1990 of Great Northern boxcars still in mid-sixties paint and lettering being used, 20 years after the BN merger.
BTW one thing on the older cars is that by 1950 cars used in interchange could no longer have archbar trucks, and had to have steel underframes - so generally you wouldn’t see cars with trussrods after WW2. Many cars with archbars had them replaced with Andrews trucks, as I understand it there was a way to re-use parts from the archbars or something that made it a more economical replacement than just buying new Bettendorfs or what have you.