I’ve heard a couple of different stories on this, and I want to get this straight:
The BLT date I get - the date the car was actually manufactured, but what is the NEW date?
I’ve heard that it’s a re-weigh date for the light (unloaded) weight of the car, and that it’s the date of the last major rebuild/overhaul.
What’s the real story here?
NEW is new empty weight - the date of the latest reweigh of the car. Since most everything was charged by weight and mileage, the empty weight of the car was very important. There are regualtions on how often a car must be reweighed to keep that number accurate. In addition, if work is done to the car, it also must be reweighed. So a NEW can CAN be when the car was overhauled, but it doesn’t have to have had any work done to it for there to be a NEW number.
–Randy
Thanks for that great bit of info, Randy. I didn’t realize that. Always something to learn…
Tom
One thing that can be confusing is that a car would only say “New” when it was…well, new. When the car is reweighed (or goes thru repairs) it would be restencilled with the date it was reweighed or the work was done (I assume anytime a car was worked on for anything except very minor running repairs, it had to be reweighed too) but it wouldn’t say “NEW” anymore. It would usually have a couple of letters indicating where the work was done by the railroad.
So if a railroad bought a new boxcar in Feb 1954, it would say “BLT 02-54” on (normally) the left side of the car as you faced the side, and “NEW 02-54” on the right side. If the car was sent to the railroad’s shops in Chicago for some repairs and a reweigh in November 1958 it would come out still saying “BLT 02-54” of course, since that’s when it was built, but on the right side it would say maybe “CHI 11-58” indicated it was last repaired/reweighed in the railroad’s Chicago shops 11-58.
That’s one thing to look for when buying pre-dec freight cars. It’s easy to see a car says “BLT 05-68” and assume it’s OK for your c.1970 model railroad, but the car might in fact have a reweigh date from 20 years later, and be in a much later paintscheme that wouldn’t have existed in 1970.
I’ve been trying to organize My model rr equipment & have been recording the build dates data for all rolling stock. I’ve seen a few that has RO & a date, I assume this was the date the car was rebuilt & repainted ? I’ve found a few cars that are too new for My modeled era - the 60’s . What does the RO stand for, this was an N & W car in question. R
Norfolk & Western? Gotta mean their Roanoke, Virginia shops then.
Randy & Stix:
Thanks, guys, for the info. That’s pretty much what I had thought, that the NEW was for a re-weigh, since the company bean counters really don’t care when the car would have ben rebuilt, just how much billable cargo it was carrying…
Stix, I’ve found that the placement of the re-weigh data is usually on the left side of the car, near the other weight data. And it usually says NEW, rather than a location code, though that, too can vary by railroad.
All you guys, thanks for the info! As usual, you come through when needed!
gmcrail: Yes, the weigh/reweigh date is always right below or next to the weight and capacity data which is usually right under the car number. However “NEW” is specifically the date of it’s first weighing at the manufacturer. Any other reweigh will have the initials of the RR shop. (eg. “RO” in an post above)
Not “NEW”.
Older cars may have also had the BLT date stencilled somewhere else, in the modern time frame the BLT or RBLT date is always in those black data boxes (consolidated stencils or “lube plates”).