Some of the comments on the photo indicated it was draft gear failure, but that doesn’t look like thats what happened to me. The boxcar frame apperars straight, and the extension with the coupler on it isn’t ripped at all, and most importantly, its neatly plumbed with the air hose for the brakes. If it was ripped out from under the car, wouldn’t there be signs of broken welds, or other damage?
I can think of a few situations where you might need extra clearance :
-When dealing with a crane that overhangs its frame
-When loading a carfloat/barge, where you can’t put the locomotive weight on the barge (since it would tip over.)
But what would you need a car like this for? I can’t imagine that having the coupler on the end of that bar would be very stable at all. Go around a curve, and you’d force the box car off the rails. On a railroad, there are all sorta of one-off situations where odd things happen, and odd/interesting/one-off soliution are needed, but what would require something like this where a perfectly good boxcar would be modified?
The car number says Illinois Central Gulf, ICG591175.
Anyone know/have a better guess what this car was built for?
The reporting marks are actually ICG, you can see the I on the end reporting marks.
Notice how far down the coupler and the part of the underframe it is attached to sag. I do not think that this boxcar was built or intentionally modified this way (unless it is being dismantled). I would say there is something wrong with it. My guess is that perhaps it is a cushioned underframe and that is why it was pulled out without visible damage to the rest of the car.
that is a old car the newer cars dont have that long a draw bar. there is springs and maybe shocks ( lack of better word ) hydrolics self contained, anyways what it does is slow down the speed of the slack action either when streching or bunching. they are great for the cargo ( which is what they are for fragile loads) but a headache for crews mostly engineers as when we are slowing down thinking all slack is in then BAM the cushion cars report in. then we slightly speed up then slow back down. cushion cars multiply the feel of the forces of your train.
That is the original design for a cushion underframe. It was designed to reduce slack action when starting or switching the car. Obviously it could not handle every situation. In the steel mills we had an expression, " five percent of equipment failures were caused by equipment. 95% were caused by operator brutality".Either this thing rusted, failed or was jerked beyond its ability to absorb the forces. The idea is used in many pieces of equipment. Some motor couplings to rotating equipment have devices to absorb the starting torque until the driven object comes up to speed. Bungie cords use the same principal to a degree.
There are basically two types of cushioning devices on freight cars that have cushioning (not all do, obviously): floating-sill and end-of-car. This ICG car has (had) a floating-sill cushion underframe. These underframes travel freely from one end of the car to the other, attached only in the center of the car. Maximum travel is usually 30 inches (older ones–pain in the posterior) or 20 inches. The actual cushioning device is supposed to absorb shocks and return the car to center.
End-of-car cushioning has been around as long as floating-sill devices, but weren’t very popular until the mid-1970s, when all of SSI/Itel’s “cushion service” cars came out. These basically absorb the impact at both ends within the drawbar assembly–travel is usually 10 or 15 inches. Most modern box cars have end-of-car cushioning.