Sam: you must have been following the work train back over the hill (no freight moving between Trinidad and Lamy)
Quite possibly(?) Never saw it, just the red signals and an occasional yellow as we followed it, very slowly, over the Pass and Eastward…Did see some cars left on sidings[MOW debris,ties, maybe.]
Back to the gondolas, I recall reading somewhere along the line that in years past small coal dealers preferred to get coal in a drop-bottom gondola rather than a hopper car if they didn’t have an elevated coal dock. The hopper car would dump straight down onto the track in the siding. Gondolas with hatches in the floor were set up so the hinges were towards the center of the car, so coal unloaded thru the hatches would go to the side of the track. That made it much easier to say use a portable conveyer to load the coal into a truck, and you didn’t have to try to dig around under the hopper car to get the coal clear before moving it after it dumped.
WHAT? SPEND MONEY ON NON-REVENUE EQUIPMENT? THAT"S JUST CRAZY TALK.
Jeff
[sigh] Some things never change
Looking at it in a slightly different way - especially on a piece of equipment that sees so few miles in actual service each year! (which is a good thing, if you think about it)
- PDN.
They were never idle on Santa Fe unless they were bad ordered. Plenty of non-Suspense/Force/casualty account work out there. Ballast, waste ballast/screenings and rip rap were always on the move along with projects in the terminals. Road crossing ballast was a common application.
(access to a Loram/Georgetown “Dump Train” is still tightly restricted)
I have been in Jacksonville for the past month. A Herzog GPS ballast train has been parked on the FEC here ever since the day I arrived.
never knew about open bottom gondolas, only hoppers. Do remember riding in gondola cars on Q steam trips pulled by #4960. Great place to watch the action and get hit by cinders, ha ha, as she was coal powered at that time. Dad and I loved to stand out there and watch the world go by, Mom usually stayed inside.
The B&O would deliver a number of ‘no bottom’ gons to Bethlehem Steel at Sparrows point when the ‘push’ was on to fill Beth Steel’s car orders. (had been wood floor gons with the floors burnt out from prior hot slab loadings)