Steel flat-car loads

Model Railroader Prototype information for the modeler
1

After some help to load steel beams etc. for transportation.

MR dec 2011 page 48 has a good article for the more modern modeller, but I would like to know how it was done back in the 50’s and 60’s?

I suspect that ‘gons’ would have been used a lot. Were steel bands used back then?

Thanks fellas

Rob

2

I would guess that steel banding started in WWII. I expect both flats and gons were used–both would be roughly equivalent. The big difference is you can use a fork to unload a flat. I would also think that loads of steel in gons would be blocked in place (in addition to any banding). For both gons and flats, there’s be blocking under the load so a strap could go under for lifting.

Ed