While browsing through the UP rolling stock section at rr-fallenflags.org, I came across a 70s-era picture of what looks like a double door boxcar with an extra section added to extend the car’s height. Car number is UP 518000. Looks like UP turned an originally plate B boxcar into a high-cube, though the double doors are still the original height. I don’t know if this boxcar was originally built this way, but it looks like a rebuild.
It is definitely a rebuild. You can see the old roof profile on the end.
Which raises the question of whether this is a one-off special car or maybe an attempt by the home shops to meet a new requirement on the railroad.
There were or are a lot of these shorty hi-cubes (and HO, N and Lionel models are available). There are loads such as home appliances, furniture, and auto parts that are more bulky than heavy so the height is raised to load even more without coming anywhere near to taxing the load capacity of the car.
Once the clearance capacities of railroads were increased to handle the really huge auto parts boxcars and auto racks, the railroads took advantage of that to raise the roof on older boxcars to increase their load.
Dave Nelson
As I recall, this was part of a series of cars, which has since been retired.
Such cars are not uncommon. UP still has a goodly number in the MP 269000 series, IIRC.
In the mid-1980s, Conrail rebuilt a large number of its 60-foot auto-parts box cars by adding a couple of feet of height to them. The difference between those rebuilds and the UP cars is that new doors were given to the cars, covering the entire height. Some of the Conrail rebuilds have the height added at the eaves, like UP 518000; others have an added section in the middle of the sides and ends.
Just about every major railroad has done this at one time or another–there are a few NS (and Southern) cars, GTW, CSX (some of C&O’s newest box cars were rebuilt KCS 60-footers), CNW, MSDR, HS, MDW, and even Illinois Central had them.
There are also a number of ordinary-looking 50-foot box cars that have had maybe six inches of height added–probably making them Plate C instead of Plate B; this is usually done at the eaves, and may or may not include increased-height doors. Railroads that have or have had these are KCS (some ex-CNW cars), HS, EEC, MDR, SLR, MQT, and probably a few dozen others. A lot of the cars rebuilt this way were originally Railbox cars, though you’d never know it now.
Something else to keep one busy during the dull, boring minutes after the locomotives go by…
That’s a UP class A-50-19 car (originally built 1947).
The rebuilding program which produced the strange look went on in the 1965-66 period. All 23 so modified were retired by the end of the 1980s.
But if the door height is not increased, I do not see how the extra interior height would be any advantage…after all, if you can’t fit it through the door…
As long as the doors accommodate the forklift, and there’s inside room to stack one refrigerator on top of another, no problem!
Kinda like a hay mow - all the hay goes in through that one itty-bitty door… One bale at a time.