I am new to N scale. This weekend, I went to a local club show and found a few excellent deals or at least they seemed so to me! These local clubs do not seem to be as dominated by dealers, so they seem more willing to barter a little. One fella, was selling off 23 Atlas rolling stock cars in a wooden cigar box for $25. He accepted $22 which brings this mix of stock to $1 a car…cannot complain. I was a little surprised to find a few small cars, about 1.5 inches in length which I guess would model 20’ cars. Some typical 3" and 4" for the 40’ and 50’ cars. There were (4) 6" Amtrak passenger cars which I guess are around 80’. What surprised me a little was three box cars that measure 6 1/2" in length or around 86’ feet or so in length for prototype. They look HUGE next to the other cars. I was just curious if such cars existed and what their purpose was in real life? For N scale, they look too long to me? But I do think they are neat.
I’m not a rolling stock offcianado, and I’m sure they’ll be along, put I’m guessing they’re some 86’ auto parts boxcars.
The big 86’ boxcars are used almost exclusively for carrying sheet metal stampings of car & truck body panels in portable racks from a stamping plant to assembly plants. The parts and their carrying racks are quite bulky so the load ends up being extremely light, allowing the cars to be so massive. You’d typically see them in the same trains as autoracks as automotive traffic is typically high priority. These cars will normally be assigned to particular pools serving a given manufacturer (Ford or GM).
Note that the cars are never empty, as they return the empty parts racks to the stamping plant, so the “empty” return movements are just as high priority as the loads. Also note that more modern plants typically have their own stamping facility so they just receive the raw sheet steel coils or blanks directly (usually by truck rather than rail).
I believe Chris summde it up the best as they do sound like auto parts boxcars. If I remember hearing correctly the cars with 4 doors served Chrysler and Ford plants while GM used 8 door cars. They would be operating from the `60s to today. In addition to the 86 foot cars there would also 60 footers hauling autoparts and even some specially equipped 50 foot cars.