The 50,000 Coal Car Thread got me thinking (always a dangerous thing): What type of railcars are now (or have been) converted to other uses?
I see lots of old piggy-back cars being used to haul plate steel, and have seen autoracks cut down to flat cars to hold stick rail. Also gondolas with racks installed to hold turnouts.
Has to be more…
When you say autoracks, do you mean the old open type or the newer enclosed ones?
Back in the mid-1900s, several northeastern railroads including the Bangor & Aroostook Railroad and Maine Central converted a bunch of older wooden 40’ boxcars for pulpwood service by chopping off the roof. I suspect other railroads did similar things with their old boxcars. Photo of a car in Christmas tree service
In the late 1980s, the Bay Colony Railroad on Massachusetts’ Cape Cod built rotary dump gons for their new “Trash Train” out of 50’ boxcars. The roofs were removed and beefed up to be lifted off for loading and unloading, the doors filled in, and interior walls smoothed out for dumping. This service made up most of their business and hauled trash from Cape Cod to SEMASS, a waste-to-energy plant in Rochester, MA. Photo | 1989 Article
When the Massachusetts Coastal Railroad took over Cape operations from Bay Colony, they switched to a fleet of 20 former Canadian Pacific “bathtub” coal gons. I assume these have some sort of roof, but I’m not sure exactly what. Photo
Back in the 1960’s, CP converted some old heavyweight passener cars to make-shift early container cars by cutting off everything above the side sill.
Steam locomotive tenders were sometimes converted to water cars.
A lot of MOW equipment was and is re-purposed. Everything from old flats, gons, and boxcars to continuous welded rail trains, passenger equipment and boxcars to bunk cars and tool cars, tank cars to weed spraying train, water car, and fire-fighting service, coal and covered hoppers (and some gons) to ballast car service, gons and boxcars to new tie service, etc.
I beleive they were covered ones; they just took the shell off the flatcar.
I’ve seen woodchip cars being used for construction debris, and NS has some M-O-W grey cars used for old ties - I think they may be old coke cars?
Ahhh, where to begin…
Box cars: Non-revenue equipment such as tool cars, cut down to form wheelset flat cars, and rebuilt to form bigger box cars (used to be stretched from 40 feet to 50 feet; more recently increased in height). Roofs removed for coke or pulpwood service; doors removed for woodchip service. Some converted to cabooses (FEC…more recent than you think!).
Refrigerator cars: To box cars (mechanical equipment removed).
Tank cars: C&O (and perhaps a few other railroads) put hatches and slope sheets in them for the transport of diesel sand.
Gondolas: Sides installed for crosstie transport, ends and parts of sides removed for service in welded-rail trains.
Coal gons: besides being used for scrap or tie service, some have actually been modified with hoppers and slope sheets for ballast service (Herzog’s cars). Others have been cut down for more routine gondola service; one series had covers fitted for coil steel service after being cut down. UP put fiberglass covers on a bunch of them for transporting contaminated radioactive soil.
Hoppers: The earliest covered hopper cars were just that–roofs installed on ordinary hoppers. Some hoppers had sides and ends increased in height for coke or woodchip service. Some hop
Farmers often bought old cars when they were obsoleted, and sometimes salvaged cars from a wreck and repurposed them to be:
Chicken coops
Grain Storage
Machine shops
Incorporated into the barn or sometimes a part of the living quarters of the house.
See the thread “Feeling a bit BOX’ed in?” http://cs.trains.com/TRCCS/forums/t/203743.aspx?PageIndex=1 for a photo of two boxcars parked side by side about 10 ft apart with doors added to the gap between them and a roof put over the whole thing to form a storage building for a commercial business.
The same things are now happening to the intermodal containers that are too expensive to ship back empty to the orient for reuse. I have seen photos of them being used as the framework to build apartment buildings and other (People type) dwellings as well as permanent storage buildings for many types of businesses. That has become a problem in some cities where stores are using them for storage in their parking lots and cities are passing ordinances to govern their placement and how long they can remain in one place if not registered with the fire department as a permanent building.
As mentioned, bulkhead flats with the bulkhead cut down, for sheet steel service, like Zug, quite a few 89’ autoracks with the rack cutoff, obviously with a torch, used to haul equipment, poles, rail and other odd things.
Only a few box cars with the tops gone, couldn’t tell what was in them, but it stunk to high heaven.
Did see a roofless high cube box full of wood chips, the box had seen better days long long ago!
UP did a series of older flats and converted them to coil cars of sorts, obviously home shop built, and they have nice porches to ride on.
Mostly we see the chopped autoracks though…
Woodchip cars used to haul scrap steel.
While touring the Hollidaysburg shops during the Conrail days, they were converting box cars to gondola’s.
CSX has some pulpwood cars that were turned into RCO platforms.
Yes, Ed, those UP coil cars are old bulkhead flats–the porches are where the bulkheads used to be!
I forgot a couple: CSX put much taller sides and ends on a few gondolas for fluff service (not kidding here!), and NS converted some old Airslide covered hoppers to flat-bottomed scrap gons.
Carl: CNW cut down boxcars into spine cars in the late 80’s as a desperation move, shortly before the single bogey flats…
89 foot TOFC flats to redstreaks, tub cars for 78’ blank rails out of the mills, windmill blade transports (lots of those up here including some odd “sling” cars…
The old DDOX 100 ton flats (6-axle) have had lots of uses, including a turntable, bridges and Ohio crane idller cars for the Birminghammer piledriver. A bunch of SP flats became a temporary freeway bridge on I-5 for a year in Claifornia…
Santa Fe’s CWE shops at AQ made all kinds of interesting conversions. I rode all over the place on M-K motorized flatcars.
That’s another one I forgot…Southern cut box cars down to make piggyback flats, CNW cut down RBLs and box cars to make both single-unit pigs and spine cars (MKT also had cut-down boxes made into pigs). I don’t think any of them lasted very long.
Thanks, MC!
GE converted 100 - 50 foot box cars into woodchip cars with a end door. That did not work out so the cars hauled cotton seed from Arkansas to California.
I do not know who the car owner was but they used double decker stock cars to haul electric golf carts.
Semper Vaporo wrote the following post on Saturday, April 28, 2012
"…Farmers often bought old cars when they were obsoleted, and sometimes salvaged cars from a wreck and repurposed them to be:
Chicken coops
Grain Storage
Machine shops
Incorporated into the barn or sometimes a part of the living quarters of the house…"
Out here in Kansas, particularly in South East Kansas (The KATY RR’s Main Back Shop was in Parsons,Ks)
One is treated to the odd site of deteriorated old wooden sheathered Boxcars out in pastures and fields, choked with weeds and vines, and many farmers bought steel boxcars, as well. They are in service still, as grain storage, bales of straw,etc. and miscellaneous farm uses. Over west of Pittsburg, Ks there are some up on concrete foundations high enough to walk off of trucks in them. There is even just outside of Pittsburg ,a KCS Baggage Car painted in the old 'Belle" scheme being used by a fireworks company.
Rio Grande parked some coal cars filled with dirt as a windbreak at the “big ten” curve at the base of the foothills W of Denver.
Between Joliet, Il and Bloomington just east of I55, beyond the UP (ex GM&O) tracks there is an old Rock Island flatcar used as a bridge across a creek/ditch.
My goal in life is to have an old UTLX (Union Tank Car) tank and modify into a very large smoker. Imagine the amount of ribs, tips, and pork butt one could smoke in one of those.
Ed
Road Bridges
The UP has converted lots of flats to ROW bridges along their route here.
Don’t forget the ex-AMTK boxcars that were converted to mechanical reefers.
http://www.rrpicturearchives.net/rsPicture.aspx?road=PBRX&cid=30
http://www.railcarphotos.com/Search.php?SearchReportingMark=PBRX&Search=Search
