HAG, followed by month and year, is a identification marking on some freight cars and also C&I or CRBS, followed by month and year or over the date (Conrail, Reading cars, for instance). Can anyone explain me the meaning of these markings?
Otherwise, I notice that roof walks had been outlawed for new freight cars back in 1966, but many older cars with roof walks were still at interchange service well after that year. At least, I’ve seen pictures of the late seventies and even more recent. Until when, more or less, could one find roof walk cars at service?
Your cryptic initials are either shop symbols, or, more recently, the railroad reporting marks of the place where the car was last weighed. You probably saw these initials and dates on the same line as the “LT WT” figure. “HAG” was probably Hagerstown, Maryland (WM?); C&I is the Cambria & Indiana Railroad, and CR BS is a commonly-seen shop symbol on Conrail (I’m sure we have some credible people who can tell us which shop that was).
It sounds like you expected roofwalks to disappear from box cars just as soon as the law was enacted. These things take time–and there was probably a deadline date by which all box cars had to be without roof walks. There were also probably numerous extensions to the original deadline. There were still plenty of cars with roof walks in the early 1980s, and I saw one at least ten years later than that. But by then they were enough to raise eyebrows over.
Paul’s right–covered hoppers have walkways on top to access the roof hatches. However, on most of the new ones, this access is via end ladders only–if you drop off the side feeling with your foot for a ladder rung, you didn’t read the written warnings on the roof, and you’re in for a surprise!
Bob, can you imagine what most railroaders and oversight agencies would say if it was still required that we brakemen walk over the car roofs from car to car while the train was moving, winding up hand brakes (something that requires lowering yourself onto a brake platform to do properly?
Several things made this undesirable, beginning in the 1960s:
–Taller box cars, including hi-cube cars (some of the earliest ones did have walkways up there, but lost them quickly).
–Cushioning devices on box cars increasing the distance between carbodies (extensions to the walkways did little to help that–and there was always the chance that the distance between carbodies could change dramatically in mid-jump).
–different heights for cars in a freight train, and cars such as gons and hoppers that had no roof walks at all. What do you do when the next car is an empty hopper or coal gon? This was probably always a problem, but box cars are a lot less prevalent nowadays than they were before the 1960s.
So, at the same time the roof walkways were eliminated, hand brake wheels were lowered to a point away from the roofs, and an alternate way of getting from one side of the car to the other (end walkways) was provided. This took place on box-type cars first, and later on covered and open-top hoppers. It may still be necessary to apply or release a number of hand brakes on a cut of cars, but this is done from the ground now, and you don’t have to climb up nearly as far to reach them (most of the newer brakepersons will refuse to climb a tall ladder on some of the older covered hoppers or whatever that are still around).
Thanks Carl. You covered everything. The reason I asked was I just saw a cartoon of a train stopped on a high trestle. The engineer says, “I think it is a broken air hose. You better walk it”