I have a few questions about grain hoppers. Being from Florida I would call my understanding and knowledge of grain hoppers pretty slim so any information that I can get on this topic would be appreciate.
I love the Exactrail 4427 series of hoppers along with the Tangent PS-2CD 4740, PS-2CD 4000 and the Athearn FMC 4700, 54’PS. The paint schemes on all of them are very atractive. The questions I have with these hoppers are:
-Can they be mixed with modern equipment (1990’s+) with out being to ragged out?
-What time period would suit them the best?
-I see some are from Iowa, Texas, Colorado, Illinois, along with leasing companies and road names. Can they be mixed and interchanged to service elevators in other states?
Looking forward to reading any feedback on this topic. Take Care.
I live in Florida also and I have seen several elevator cars in the last couple of years mixed in among other hoppers. I saw a car from Aurora, Nebraska and one from Tamora, Nebraska roll through town in the last year. In the yard in Mulberry I saw a Farnhamville, Iowa car and a Boone Valley (Eagle Grove, Iowa) car. The last car was very weathered and the lettering was hard to decipher but the others were still quite recognizable even thought they were very weathered as well. These cars are the ones I remember specifically because they are the ones I collect, but I know I have seen some cars from other states as well.
The build dates on the photos I have seen from most of the elevator cars seem to be in the 70s, so that is when you would have seen the greatest quantity and the least weathering. I think I can safely say that any elevator car that you see today has been sold to another company and therefore the road numbers will have been patched and changed. Some of the cars have even had their names painted over and you can only identify them by their color and the size and location of the patch jobs. I have seen some Peavey cars that way.
In general terms, grain-hauling covered hoppers have been around since the 1960’s and are still very common today, so anytime within that time period would be correct for the cars themselves. As always, paint schemes can be a little harder to date, especially with private owners / lessors who may not have been so well documented as railroad cars.
From what I’ve seen, cars generally continued in service in one paint scheme for a long time. Burlington Northern was still using GN “Big Sky Blue” style covered hoppers in the eighties for example, and on CP in St.Paul MN I often see old “CANADA” cars whose lettering is 25 years old or so. Generally these cars could get pretty ragged on the outside; as long as they still worked they would be used during the grain rush.
I have seen those hoppers pressed into phosphate service. Alot of them going to CF Industries in Zephyrhills. Looks like some Union Equity hoppers and others. Also alot of Canadian hoppers at the facility in downtown Tampa.
Absolutely! Living in central Ohio, I guess it’s no surprise that I have a love affair with grain hoppers. Between the various models and all the paint schemes, I cant get enough!
Sometimes full trains will be of the modern hoppers from Trinity and such and sometimes a mix of old and new. With that said, unit grain trains often travel through my city with the entire consist made up of late 60’s-70’s era cars…in 2011! Everything from fallen flag Class 1s like Milwaukee Road, Rock Island, Southern, NW, CNW, L&N, SCL to 60’s era Canadian cylindrical hoppers to old farmer’s co-ops from Iowa and elsewhere. Of course most, if not all, have new reporting marks patched over. In my mid-80’s era Chessie System modeling, there were many Rock Island The ROCK hoppers running about with CNW patched marks, since the Rock Island had gone bankrupt in 1980 and those aforementioned Iowa Co-op hoppers serving their owners in trains on the east coast. In my research, it seems that just about any type of grain hopper could be seen just about anywhere grain trains ran.
Go to www.railcarphotos.com, click “Search Photos (Faster)” select the covered hopper type you want to search in the pull down menu and enter your date bracket in the “Photo Date Between” spaces. If you model 1992, for instance, choose “Covered Hopper - 3 Bay Cylindrical” between the dates of 1992-01-01 and 1992-12-31 and you should get some great photographic evidence and what hoppers were running during your modeling year. Go back and select the other hopper varieties for your time frame and search again. You can choose a later date than your era to see more models/schemes, though the marks may have changed after your era.
Also, www.rrpicturearchives.net has a lot of freight car photos (click “Rolling Stock” on the menu at left). They currently have over 120,000 photos of covered hoppers. The weakness with this site is that you can only search by general car type “covered hopper” and reporting marks, not by date (it’s really more