I am looking at purchasing rolling stock that fits my time era and was excited to see some flat bed stock that was built in the 1930’s. But then I noticed what appeared to be a second date of a sorts (12-53) proceeded with the letters SAG. Does anyone know what this “SAG” means? Is it a rebuild date of Dec. 1953? Are there other initials that can proceed this date as well that I should be aware of? Can’t seem to find any information on the letters in any of the railroad definintion web sites. Thanks.
Rebuilt would be RBLT 12/53.
What you saw was probably when the friction bearings was repack(repk) or the car light weight was reweigh for varication…
SAG was where the work or reweighing of the car was done.
“Rebuilt” means the car was basically taken completely apart and had everything checked and repaired and put back together, creating a virtually new car. Freight cars can only operate for so many years (I think 25?) and then have to either be retired from interchange service, or rebuilt.
When new, the car would have a “BLT” (built) date and “NEW” date that would be the same. The “BLT” date would remain the same normally until the car was rebuilt (“RBLT”), but the “NEW” date would be replaced when the car was reweighed or repacked as Brakie mentions. The “NEW” would be replaced with a 2-4 letter code the railroad uses to show which of it’s shops did the work. In my area, common ones would be “CHI” for Chicago or “MPLS” for Minneapolis.
If you post what railroad your flatcar belongs to, someone could probably work out which city “SAG” stands for.
BTW you have to be a little wary about using the built date to determine if a freight car is right for your era or not. If you model say the 1930’s, you could find a boxcar with a built date of 1928, but that is wearing a later paint scheme from the 1940’s or 50’s that would make it be incorrect for the 1930’s.
Some of the “blt” dates painted on commercial rolling stock are either arbitrary or fictitious so it pays to actually have resources about the prototype. And there can be other dates such as RPKD and weighted dates that date a car. And a car can have a perfectly acceptable blt date but the paint scheme might be all wrong for your era (either too new or too old). There are other issues. Some cars have BLT dates that are solidly within my 1967-69 era, but many of them also have consolidated stencils (those painted black squares near the lower right hand side of the car) that came about around 1974 or so, so those either have to be removed or lived with assuming I really want the car.
The NMRA has a useful datasheet on some of these issues
http://www.nmra.org/member/sites/default/files/datasheets/Rolling/d5e.PDF
As for SAG this useful website has modern codes for this sort of thing but it does not list SAG
http://fcix.info/ref_sheets/ref008.pdf
Maybe Saginaw MI? Saginaw TX? My hunch is Michigan as that was a considerable rail center back in its day.
Dave Nelson
As I mentioned in my earlier post, if the OP would say what railroad owned the flatcar, it would be a lot easier to work out what “SAG” meant.
[banghead]
Not necessarily: any common carrier road on which the car may be located can do the re-weigh and/or re-pack work, then bill the owner railroad accordingly.
SAG is Saginaw, Michigan, and is/was a C&O scale.
As far as that “NEW” notation, or the replacement one with a scale location and a date, it refers only to the car’s weight and the manner in which it affects the car’s capacity. The car’s LT.WT. is the weight of the empty car, which may change as repairs and modifications are made. This weight is deducted from a weight pre-determined by the car’s CAPY. to give the LD.LMT.
For a car with a nominal CAPY of 100,000lbs, that number is 169,000, so a car weighing 42,500lb would have a LD.LMT. of 126,500. (The numbers in this part of the dimensional data are always rounded-off so that the last two digits are zeroes.)
As for REBUILT cars, most roads simply changed the BLT date to reflect the change. A car could receive new trucks and updated brake gear, new ends and sides, and a new roof, and it could not be shown as re-built, only “REFURBISHED”.
For a car to be considered re-built, the car’s frame had to be replaced or altered in a significant manner. An example of that would be adding a frame to a truss-rod car, either leaving the truss rods in place or replacing them completely with the new frame.
I built a model of an X-29 boxcar for a friend’s retirement (he was the Chief of Operations for a shortline), and while I had the prototype available to note the details which needed to be added, I couldn’t figure out why the car had a BLT date of 7-34, as it appeared to be one of th
Wow! a ton of great information guys. Thanks a ton. I really learned a lot.