Got yet another question for my Forum friends: When were cars that travel between Canada and the US first required to carry dimensional data in both pounds and kilograms? I have a printing plant on my 70s layout that receives newsprint that would come from north of the border. I know modern cars need both as I have seen tank cars with both systems parked on some repair facility tracks here in town but I don’t know if that would apply to my era.
Thank you for any assistance that can be provided and for reading my post.
Canadian cars of the 1970s–and 80s, that I saw, and photograhed, carried the same dimensional data format, using pounds, feet, etc, as American equipment. The only concession was Canadian National’s use of the French spelling of “Canadien” on one sdie of the car out of respect for the large French speaking population of Canada’s eastern provinces.
This metric business must be a recent developement. If you’re modeling the 1970s, “fugedaboutit”! Mexican cars ALWAYS carried their data in the metric system.
Rapido needs to do some Canadian NSC 40 foot boxcars with the eight foot sliding doors as used by both CN and CP, in newsprint service. Hmm. Maybe a dozen. Rather than be limited to a few roads cars just delivering newsprint, I am going to do a paper products distributor, that handles products for business and industry, arriving in cars from the paper producing companies all over North America.
We regularly get CNIS boxcars here. I always thought the IS was for international service - and they couldn’t be reloaded domestically - they had to return north when unloaded.
There may be some “directional bias” here. The Canadian roads have series of cars for international service. The US roads do not.
Since the questions was do US cars going into Canada and Mexico have to have both US and metric data, the answer is no, they do not. There is no UPIS or BNIS pool of cars.
I always seem to have difficulties converting metric units into those that we used when I was a kid.
The situation was similar for some U.S. measurements, too, especially pints and gallons vs the Imperial measurements used here in Canada, before metric took over.
As for American freight cars, the steel plant where I worked always seemed to have a string of U.P. plugdoor boxcars (can’t remember if they were 50’ or 60’ers) parked in one of our mills that shipped out steel coils.
I didn’t work in that mill, but I’m pretty sure that there was some sort of cross-border arrangement with the company that used that type of steel. I don’t ever recall seeing Canadian cars in that area of that particular mill.
When U.S. Steel bought the Hamilton, Ontario plant, they stuck around for only a few years, then went back to the States. An acquaintance told me that U.S.S. was interested mainly in Stelco’s order books and the “recipes” for the wide range of steel products that we made.
I recall the books for those alloys that I had access to, and regret not swiping them when they tore down the mill in which I worked. Our mill only rolled steel, but the books contained not only the “recipes” but also handling and heating processes for some specialty grades.
An event that’s been stuck in my head for years actually involved those processes…the stripper building, where they removed the moulds from ingots, was directly across the tracks from our mill, and in the summer, the sides of most mills were open (sliding panels).
The switchman 'phoned me to ask where (and also how many) ingot buggies were to be spotted at each location.
This was the usual practice, but when I next looked over to the stripper building, as the last mould was being removed, I saw the switchman, firehose-in-hand, hosing-down the ingots on the ends of each buggy where he was going to have to make the cuts.
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Reason for the Canada mention is that I worked for a printing company/newspaper for about a decade and the rolls of paper we got for the web presses came out of Canada (via truck not railroad but the idea is there).
On a different but related question, does anyone have good pictures of the newsprint cars as I am most likely need to get one and a good start for an HO model of one? In the alternative, would an RBL of some sort work for a newsprint car or is that too new?
Also, I know CN and CP had cars marked for international service going back to the steam era, I don’t know if they still do now? It seems to me since the trade agreements of the 1990s (like NAFTA) came into affect, the restrictions on how long a Canadian car could be in the US (and vice versa) were pretty much eliminated.
I know visiting Canadian railroad yards in the 1970s-80s about 99% of cars were CP or CN; now many of the cars are from US roads.
Which was a design/branding choice as part of the 1960s logo redesign and not a legal requirement or mandate. (Which I’m pretty sure you’re not saying, but I’ve seen someone claim that before on this forum, so let’s head that off right now.)
The “international service” (CNIS, CPI, etc.) markings cropped up in the sixties. They also created marks (CNA, CPAA) for cars that could be used in US service. Previous to those marks, CP had a number of US-built boxcars lettered for the “International of Maine Division” which fell under that same category and were treated as US cars. CN did not have any equivalent to that, but CN did have US subsidiaries Central Vermont, Grand Trunk Western, and Duluth, Winnipeg & Pacific.
Any metric lettering is simply out of courtesy for the customers. Canadian railroads still use imperial measurements for everything, including car dimensions and weights.
Our detectors give temperature readings in Celsius instead of Fahrenheit, but that’s the only change we’ve ever made.
As I understand it, you could ship something from say Montreal to Pittsburgh in a CN or CP car, but the car could only be in the U.S. for so long (like 48 or 72 hours) before it had to be back across the border. The “international” cars were allowed to stay longer, I believe Chris is right that it was because these were US-built cars.
I recall that Duluth Winnipeg & Pacific kept a GM end-cab CN switcher in Virginia MN (where DWP interchanged with DMIR) for many years; it was OK because although it was a CN engine it had been built by EMD in the US, rather than by GMD in Canada.
Michigan Central/New York Central/Penn Central, Pere Marquette/C&O, and Wabash all operated in Canada and specifically purchased diesel engines from EMD’s Canadian division to serve their Canadian operations, built in Canada due to import duties. NYC/PC assigned some freight cars to their Canada Southern (CASO) division for Canadian service.
The CNA and CPAA cars were explicitly AMERICAN cars - i.e. built and acquired in the US, with no import duties. They could be used in international or US domestic service the same as cars from any other US railway. (There’s a reason a lot of the CN and CP auto parts boxcars were US built and CNA/CPAA, to operate in the auto parts pools with US railway cars.) As actually US cars, they could stay in the states indefinitely.
The CNIS and CPI cars were supposed to be used for cross-border international service ONLY, not to be loaded domestically in either country. I’m not fully understanding the customs regulation for that one. These were generally Canadian-built cars.
The free trade agreements loosed up a fair bit of the above.
Otherwise, any normal US or Canadian car could freely cross the border with an international shipment. Just a Canadian car could not be used domestically in the US or vice versa. I’m not too sure about the hours limitation cited though, as depending on the car’s destination it might take well over a week just to get there. The full turnaround would certainly be over that.
In looking at pictures of some of those nice looking cars, they would work for the last part of the era that I model (BN creation merger of 3-1-70 to the merger day with the Frisco of 11-21-80) but I would like something that would work closer to the mid-70s era.
To best answer your question about newsprint cars appropriate for your 1970s era, may I direct you to www.rr-fallenflags.org, go to Canadian Pacific and, freight equipment and using the numerical listing in the left hand margin, scroll down to the 5xxxx series which are 40 foot boxcars. Look at the photos taken in the time frame you model. No use looking at 1986 photos if you’re modeling 1970. Al Ferguson Black Cat Decals has a very good selection of CN, and CP sets for almost anything you may wish to do.
New York Central’s Canada Southern Ry. (technically the Canada Southern division of Michigan Central) had high-nose GP-7 and GP-9 engines built by GMD in Canada which - unlike their US counterparts - were set up to run short-hood forward. Some (all?) were bought second-hand from C&O - I wondered why C&O had GMD GPs when I first read that, hadn’t thought about C&O having lines in Canada too.