Hello,
I watched a television program a couple of night ago about the New York Central. It featured video from the '40s - ‘60s. There were a couple of different shots of passing freight trains that had open 40’ gondolas with several large cannisters inside. Does anyone know what might have been carried in these cannisters and whether or not this type of load was common outside the Northeast?
Thanks.
PD
Sounds like cement to me. L&NE and DL&W had a lot of them out of the Bangor and Portland area of PA fed to the likes of NYC at Maybrook.
Those canisters were how they shipped powdered cement in the days before covered hoppers became standard. The containers would be loaded and unloaded using compressed air and could be taken off the gondolas at a jobsite. Some railroads would cut access holes into the sides of gons used in cement service to allow the crews access to the air hoses when loading. By the mid `60s though covered hoppers were pretty much the norm and the gondolas were removed from cement service.
For the most part it was Northeastern railroads like the Lehigh Valley, New York Central,etc. that handled them but I imagine they were shipped allover the country.
Very helpful. Thank you!
PD
Did it look like this??
http://www.michaelluczak.com/oscale.html
I’ve seen them described as coke containers also, I believe coke is also very fine and would need to be covered in trainsit.
Apparently they were an early version of containers, Lionel did a No.1 gauge version in the 20’s-30’s:
http://www.lloydralstontoys.com/nopreview/090906photos/213.jpg
Yes, coke can be fine (and transported in covered hoppers these days), but most of the time (from the 1920s until CSX’s “Coke Express” hoppers still in existence) it could be transported in open-top cars–usually with increased height, since it’s much less dense than coal.
As for the photo above, the background sky must be somewhere in the Twilight Zone–particularly since we’re in a time warp in which that GN box car and those containers exist at the same time!
American Flyer offered a D&H gon with five round containers in S scale (I have one).
NYC crane at 11th Ave. and W. 30th St.
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3005/3250575619_428a823578_b.jpg
Yes, the round containers were cement as I described above and as indicated in the picture of the toy train. The square containers shown by Wanswheel are something elses again I think…earlier than the cement bottles above.
While looking for a photo of this Bulk Transfer operation, I stumbled into this website:@:
http://members.trainweb.com/bedt/indloco/dlw25.html
OF BROOKLYN, QUEENS, STATEN ISLAND, BRONX & MANHATTAN":#### TWENTY FIFTH STREET / SOUTH BROOKLYN TERMINAL
Sunset Park, Brooklyn"#### “DELAWARE, LACKAWANNA & WESTERN RAILROAD /
ERIE LACKAWANNA RAILROAD”### Scroll down to the section :“…Post Reconstruction - circa 1930 through circa 1964…”### then scroll down: to a picture of a pneumatic unload of the bulk cement containers in a gondola to a truck for final delivery.
This is an extremely interesting web site:a thorough discussion of the New York area, and many should enjoy surfing through it. The pictures of DL&W equipment, with employees shown is a seldom seen perspective.
I did not mean to hi-jack a Thread, but The photo on the website of the Container to delivery truck was one I had never seen and shows and early 20th Century operation and technology.
Hope some will enjoy it.
Great catch, Sam! Pics of cement canisters are indeed round…I don’t believe square would handle the pressure, so I don’t know what those NYC containers were for, perhaps coke as someone indicated. Also on this site, Sam, was a list of names, one of whom I knew years later when he moved up to Binghamton for the EL…Ted Gurka then Freight Agent at 25th St.!
I know there were square containers they used to transport lime in. There’s a book I have that talks extensively about a lime plant in Central PA and it specifically says that they shipped lime out in covered hoppers for large industrial clients, bagged lime in boxcars as a consumer good, and in containers in gondolas to smaller industrial customers. There’s a picture later in the book of a series of rectangular containers in an NYC gon.
It would be most interesting and worthwhile to know the dates of these 2 photos which show the square/ rectangular containers at a NYC yard of some kind . . .
Because what they show is the birth of the container and intermodal age ! There’d be not much point to having the ‘lifting loops’ on the top or runnning them to a yard with an overhead crane, if they weren’t going to be lifted out of the car for some further use or service, even if just for unloading. (The same is also true for the round cement containers that started this thread.) I believe John Kneiling referred to these early NYC operations once or twice, and also David J. Deboer in his book Piggyback and Containers (Golden West Books, 1992).
Thanks for finding and sharing, Mike/ wanswheel !
A little more thrashing about revealed the following link to another Forum (ATlas);
There are a couple of excelent photos of DL&WRR gondolas loaded with large pressurized containers (posted by Chris333) ; scrolling down a little further there is some excelent commentary by Steve Wagner and others there referencing areas of operation and loading locations.
http://forum.atlasrr.com/forum/topic.asp?ARCHIVE=true&TOPIC_ID=55643&whichpage=2
Looking at the square containers I don’t believe they were pressurized like the round one’s used for cement. And even in the 1920’s I believe container hauling was not new at all…it was just not for general loadings. No, these NYC cars had a specific purpose, specific comodity…just unravel have to unravel the mystery.
Paul;:
A couple of things: If you pt your cursor in the photos on the links provided by Mike/Wanswheel you can get a degree of magnification that does bring out some details in the picture. More details on the containers and if you’ll notice in the photos there are a couple of 'Bilboard Reeferes: A Swifr (Premium) Car and a BORDEN’S Co reefer Advertises Butter and Eggs and other products as well to the left of the Borden’s car is an ARMOUR Meats (Cloverbloom) car; they appear to
Sam -
Thanks for the ‘eagle-eye’ sleuthing ! [tup] As best as I can now recall, Kneiling said the 1920’s, which is right in the middle of your time estimate (above), and of course is consistent with henry6’s reference to the 1920’s (further above).
I hadn’t thought about these cars or containers since the last time I looked at a Lionel O Gauge trains catalog. EDIT: For example, see: http://www.davestrains.com/stock/6062rCans2.jpg There’s a big train show here in Allentown this coming weekend - might just go and see if I can pick up one of these for a reasonable price . . . [swg]
P.S. - From a review of a book - The Lehigh Valley Railroad across New Jersey (Images of Rail) - at: http://www.amazon.com/Lehigh-Valley-Railroad-across-Jersey/dp/0738565768
"I learn something new in every Images of Rails book. My “pleasant discovery” in The Lehigh Valley Railroad Across New Jersey is found on the page 28-29 spread, which shows an A-B-B lashup of F units hauling several of the Lehigh Valley’s 95 unique gondolas which were equipped with pressurized air containers for moving dry bulk cement from eastern Pennsylvania to the New York Harbor.
The containers would be lifted by cranes and placed on barges, which brought them to construction sites in and around New York Harbor.
These gondo
Paul, it has to be 1930s because the High Line is up around the 30th St. Yard. In case you haven’t seen it lately…
http://railyardsblog.files.wordpress.com/2007/12/historic-image-large.jpg
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3414/3250575471_3cfd1b0f9c_b.jpg?rand=169772561
Looking east from 11th Ave. The brakeman is not on the container car, he’s on a boxcar on the next track. In the distance, exactly beyond where the brakeman is standing, I can see the Hotel Pennsylvania above the top of Penn Station above the top of New York Post Office. PRR had tunneled directly under this New York Central & Hudson River yard.
Great pics!!!
Did PRR have similar devices/service? There a few containers that look like the ones pictured above with PRR markings that are being used for sheds in some of our local yards.
[Mike/ wanswheel - Thanks so much for digging out and posting those photos and that article ! [bow] I owe you one for this (again ?). I’ve never seen them or a reference to them before, so this has to be one of the best abnd earliest documentatins of railroad containers. Just read through that article - it could have been written in the 1950’s about TOFC, and in the 1980’s about COFC . . . For anyone interested in the history of containerization, these are the equivalent of the “Dead Sea scrolls” !
I’ll concede the 1930’s date for the photos, based on your dating them from the presence of the High Line (what a great structure and project !) - I’m not familiar enough with it to know any different (nor would i want to), I’m more than content enough with the January 1921 dates in the “Shipper & Carrier” magazine article from its March 1921 issue to establish that as the likely dates of commencement of container service, as I stated above.
Likewise, I have to defer to your identification of those landmark buildings in that one photo - I can barely pick them out of the haze. But no one has remarked on the early diesel (?) loco in this photo - which one do you think it is ?
It’s ironic that the interloper PRR tunnelled under the NYC’s yard . . .
And yes, zugmann, the PRR did have similar containers ! From some very quick and limited research, here are a couple links to more information from a model manufacturer’s website, including a reference to a 1985 PRR T&HS publication on the containers
