How do you tell the difference between an open-bottom gondola and an open hopper? Great Northern had many open-bottoms gondolas up until the 50s, I believe, when they bought their first closed-bottom gondolas. Are the open-bottom gondolas much like the closed ones in height? Would an open hopper always be taller than an open-bottom gondola, for instance?
My observations are that in the classic era, hoppers had sloped bottoms, while drop-bottom gondolas retained the flat bottom and general shape of a gondola. Many western railroads liked the flexability of the GS (general service) gondola with the drop bottom, that may carry mineral traffic or anything the usual gondola could carry, as different commodities were often seasonal.
In recent times, especially in the rotary gondola era, gondola seems to be a term used for solid bottom open top bulk carriers, without regard to hight of the car side, which have grown to hopper hight.
Wine doors, ratchets and locking clips on the drop gons …drop bottom gons tend to sit a little higher
Mac says it better.
Something to remember as a general principle for ‘aggregate’ loads is that, for a given shape and configuration of car, you will either ‘load out’ or ‘cube out’ first. Both the type of car and its height will reflect this.
First, if you are interested in the Great Northern, you should join the Great Northern Railway Historical Association. See gnrhs.org.
Gondolas are differentiated from hopper cars. Gondoala cars are open top cars with flat bottoms. They may or may not have bottom doors or side doors or removable ends. Hopper cars have hopper doors on the bottom. Most but not all are ‘self clearing’ meaning that they have slope sheets on both ends so that all of the load will slide down the sheets and out of the car. All issues of the Official Railway Equipment Register include definitions and drawings of the many varieties of both gons and hoppers.
You asked about the side wall height of drop bottom vs. solid bottom gons. In the GN case they answer is that in the 1950’s they were about the same. That is the first lot of 40’ foot ‘mill gons’ were about as tall/deep as the large fleet of GS drop bottom gons.
Wood chips, a low density product introduced tall gons on the GN, NP, SP&S, and SP, and probably other raods. The first generation of chip cars on the GN were 40 foot box cars with the roof removed. In round numbers these cars offered twice the cubic capacity of a 40 foot gon, but with the same nominal 50 ton carrying capacity. Next the GN took surplus drop bottom gons and added extended height walls and ends to increase cubic capacity. GN also had a group of 50’ chip cars converted from 50’ box cars. During the 1960’s chip hauling roads in the PNW went to purpose built chip cars abou
My only experience with gondolas was a trip from Brownville, Ala., to Buhl, Ala. and back on the Mobile and Gulf. Except for the two of us who rode the engine, our party rode in a gon. As I recall, the car had a flat bottom (they were used for transporting poles).
As to wood chip cars, I saw them, from time to time, in Reform, where they came up from the south on the AT&N to continue, on the GM&O, to a paper mill in Tuscaloosa. They looked, to me, like ordinary hopper cars.
‘Dedicated’ wood chip hoppers were normally regular open top hopper that had their top rails and siding raised a foot or more above the regular oth height. Wood chips weigh less than the normal oth commodities and additional cubeage was needed to get full utilization out of the car load.
Back in the 1930s and before, there were hopper-bottom gondolas, hoppers without slope sheets, and on and on, each design with its own mechanical designation.
The GS gondolas seemed to be bought only by railroads west of the Mississippi River. Most of those railroads weren’t very big on hopper cars. A few GS cars lasted into the 1960s and 70s.
Bethgons do come in varying heights. When the gross rail load was increased from 263K to 286K, the height went up just a bit. A lot of Bethgons have been converted to ballast hoppers for the Herzog unit ballast trains.
Slightly related–I used to have a Lionel side-dump car. I don’t remember ever seeing or hearing or reading about them in real life. Did they exist, were they common, and are there any in use today?
I have seen something like that it was a Difco side dump car for MOW.
Pretty sure there are.
They still exist and MofW mainly use them, from my observation, in moving large quantities of rip-rap to the areas of wash outs in efforts to rebuild the ground upon which the railroad is built. On CSX such cars are restricted to 30 MPH.
They must be used with car as with the loads they carry and dump, it not used properly they are able to dump themselves right into a derailment.
Side-dump cars have been used quite a bit by the taconite / iron ore railroads. Googling “Missabe side-dump car” will come up with quite a few images for example.
I saw a number of NP drop sided gons when I started on the NP in 1966. They were used for coal, coke, and scrap loads. Northtown (Minneapols) sent them north to Duluth for coal and coke loading. Our division car distributors would use them in scrap business. After the 1970 merger, I bid a relief job on the X-GN side and saw two drop bottom gons (1XNP and 1XGN car used in shuttle service between their plans in southeast Minneapolis to a scrap yard on the SOO in north Minneapolis. Both cars were old and on their last legs!
In the early 1970’s one railroad (don’t know which one) sent a load of scrap to Canada in one of the drop floor cars. There was a big derailment that was caused by the drop doors opening. After that Canada prohibited loads in that type of car unless the floor was covered with metal over the doors or the doors were welded shut.
The Hill lines did have a number of air dump cars that were used of MTCE of Way service. They were restricted to daylight operation only in case one dumped a load during train movement. I did see one dump a load of rip-rap at Northtown in the 1980’s.
Ed Burns
Retired clerk from Northtown.
We call them air-dumps. They are still in use today.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwmCExnuiMw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbf9IUgY2yI
They use a very large volume of air, sometimes one locomotive cannot keep up with a trainload of them.
They are also rather dangerous, it is quite easy to tip the car right off the track, especially if the load is frozen.
Woodchip shipments are now rare in western Canada, I think the last major moves on CN are from Houston and Fort St. James to a pulp mill in Prince George, BC. Chips have always been a low value, low revenue commodity, and they have the added downside of blowing out of the car and fouling ballast. CN tried fibreglass lids, but found they would blow off the car as well!
All the CN and BC Rail cars I’ve seen have end doors. Some mill have a tilt platform to unload them (just like the chip trucks), while others would use a front-end loader.
A number of them have been transferred to OCS junk tie service, which subjects them to abuse they were not designed for. Many loaded ones can be seen bulging under the weight of the ties.
As of 8 years ago there was one car still running around in very faded Pacific Great Eastern paint. But I only saw it once.
Side dumps / air dumps still very much exist and are still being built in small lots. (33 - 50 CY variety) … One of the more stupid operating stunts after the mergers was the downsizing of the air-dump fleets. Roadmasters fight tooth and nail to get those and keep them moving.
I got to “play” with a brand new one (1:1 scale) in Minneapolis last year before it was delivered to BNSF, complete with hydraulic assist. (BNSF generally prefers straight air - less limitations on what you can do with the car.)
DIFCO/MAGOR et al have been succeeded by a hybrid firm that also builds American Crane self propelled units for bridge and pile driver work under license - https://jk-co.com/air-side-dump-car/
Many of those Cleveland Cliffs taconite air dumps are now in captive service in CO (extended side doors, dump planks and all)
SD70-Dude: Sounds like you have some neophytes around you regarding air dumps, they don’t know how to work a compromise fitting off the main air reservoir glad-hand, your mechanical folks are a liability and some people haven’t learned to respect a tool that isn’t dangerous if it is operated competently. (What knucklehead loaded an airdump with wet material and let it sit for any length of time in cold climate country?[D)])
Now if only the #@@*&!!! mechanical people would help maintain the things and the operating bubbas would give them a little more priority before everything comes to a halt.
Quoting MC: “Now if only the #@@*&!!! mechanical people would help maintain the things and the operating bubbas would give them a little more priority before everything comes to a halt.”
Isn’t that what you get when you take people off the street and put them to work before they have learned the job?[:)]
CN Engineering, that’s who!
Most ballast for the Western Region comes from two quarries in British Columbia, McAbee (east of Ashcroft) and Kalum (just west of Terrace). Kalum is in one of the wetter parts of the northwest coast, and while McAbee is in a desert those cars still go through a wet region on the way to their destinations. CN recently stopped using a third quarry at Giscome, east of Prince George.
And since OCS moves like ballast trains are usually low-priority, those trains often end up sitting for days at a time in yards at various enroute locations, giving additional time to ‘moisten’ and then freeze the load.
I saw a bunch of loaded air-dumps go through Edmonton during this last -40 cold snap. I don’t envy the crews who will have to unload them.
Thanks, all. Glad to see they’re alive and well.
Saw a string of side dump (3) on a siding between Raton and Santa Fe on the ride to Albuquerque. So I guess BNSF srill uses them… Also saw a string of several gondolas, just north of Glorietta,NM Station. Loaded with wood debris(ties(?), they were very heavily ‘tagged’. And coming back, our train (#4) followed a freight train over Raton,( we spent about 25 minutes waiting in the tunnel.)