I’ve got a Roundhouse Seaboard boxcar and would like to know the meaning of a marking. I couldn’t locate any relevant information about it on the net. It is “SAV 7-69”… What SAV stand for?
Thank you.
Matt
My guess, given where the Seaboard operated, would be “Savannah” for the SAV.
When a car is built it will have a “NEW” date and a “BLT” (built) date that are the same. The BLT date normally doesn’t change (unless the car is rebuilt entirely) but when the car goes into the shops for work or a repaint or whatever and is reweighed, the place and date of the reweigh replaces the “NEW” date.
Each railroad has it’s own three or four letter abbreviations which generally are the names of the cities where the railroad shops are that performed the reweigh. So you might have seen a CNW car with “CHI 10-54” for a car reweighed in Chicago in October 1954, or a GN car with “STC 02-69” for a car reweighed in Feb. 1969 in GN’s St.Cloud, MN shops.
There was a duplicate thread with answers already. I guess it got nixed.
Stix is correct: re-weighing was required at set intervals (this varies as to the era which you’re modelling and may no longer be required). It was usually done by the road owning the car, but could be done anywhere, with the road performing the work billing the owning-road accordingly.
Cars were considered to be re-built only if the frame was changed (either modified or replaced). The car would then be treated as a new one and would be stencilled accordingly. In some instances, REBLT was used rather than BLT., followed by the appropriate date.
When a car’s frame was not changed, the car could still be modified considerably, up to and including receiving a completely new superstructure, with the original BLT date remaining unchanged. In this case the notation RECONDITIONED, followed by the date of the work, could be added.
Wayne
I wrote about re-weigh dates and how to use them as an indicator of your railroad’s period in my article “Ready to run in 3 hours” in the August 2011 Model Railroader.
So long,
Andy