Watch the video. It’s the first car behind the lead engines. It looks like a cattle car but I have never seen one that long.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FtdG9wes0I&list=PL12BAD08693FF61FC
Yup, definitely a stock car, as you can see the beef moving around inside the car. There’s some more info on it HERE. Scroll down to “Modern Conversions”.
Wayne
Looks like an older type Auto rack car to me,at the head end of a TOFC Intermodal train. If you go to full screen,you can make out shadows,of what looks like cars,much bigger that what cattle would look like and what would a stock car be doing,on a Intermodal train?
Cheers,[D]
Frank
Its a stock car and its on a intermodal train because they are fast and don’t make a lot of stops. The UP put its stock cars on the head end of intermodal trains at the twilight of stock moves.
The caption to the vid says it was one of the last stock moves the videographer caught.
Some of the very last stockcars built in the 1960s were enormous, and a Northern Pacific “pig palace” car in the 1970 Car Builder’s Cyclopedia looks about this size - 85 foot cars. A photo in the 1970 Cyclopedia, and in the NMRA Bulletin for December 2001, shows a Pig Palace car with an end rather like an auto parts boxcar; the photo in the 1966 Cyclopedia shows an 85’ Pig Palace with more conventional boxcar ends (and a roofwalk running board) so there may have been more than once variant on these huge cars. Both the 1966 and 70 Cyc’s also show a 60 foot car that the GN kitbashed from two 40 foot cars.
WIth trackside stockyards being a rarity by the time this video was taken, any stock car movement would have been given top priority given the federal mandates on hours between stopping for rest and watering of the animals, so it is not surprising that it would have been the first car (to minimize slack action) in an expedited train. Indeed you sometimes even read about stock cars being added to passenger trains towards the end of stock car operations, again because the lack of stockyards and the requirement to feed, water, and rest the animals at regular intervals made them top priority cars.
Dave Nelson
That’s an Ortner “Steer Palace” car, an 86-foot double-deck design based on the earlier Northern Pacific triple-deck “Big Pig Palace,” itself adapted from a high cube auto parts car. Penn Central and later Conrail used these cars to move cattle from the midwest (Chicago and Kansas City) to slaughterhouses in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, and moved the cars in priority intermodal trains.
Here’s a photo of the prototype, taken at roughly the same Horseshoe Curve locale as the video. Photo credit Darrall Swift http://www.railcarphotos.com/PhotoDetails.php?PhotoID=41780 .
All the answers make sense,I did catch the last stock move statement. But I will honestly admit,at 70,I don’t ever recall ever seeing one and I grew up very near the Chgo stockyards.[:)]
Cheers,[D]
Frank
Thanks for the great answers. I love learning new things. OMI made a car like this. Is this it?
That’s the original NP triple-deck, “Big Pig Palace,” mentioned above as the inspiration for the car in the video.
Japan’s narrow gauge and restricted loading gauge never allowed anything like those humongumonsters, but they did have a double deck pig car with a brakeman’s cabin at one end. A model occasionally runs through Tomikawa on my JNR mainline. I’ve often wondered if the rear end crew wears nose plugs…
Chuck (Modeling Central Japan in September, 1964 - pig suburban duplex brake van included)
Past time for bed, I thought that said, “is this a kit”. Obviously not.
–Randy
Yes, the Northern Pacific was an innovative railroad.
It was mentioned in the Car Builder’s Cyclopedia that one of the advantages to these pig palace cars, apart from their size, was that the interior was all smooth steel, with no rough wood or protruding nails to harm the animals.
One of the trainset type manufacturers, perhaps Bachmann perhaps LifeLike before they were Walthers, perhaps even Model Power, made a sort of hi cube stock car in HO but of standard length, using their normal boxcar underframe and truck mounted couplers. I have often toyed (no pun intended) with the idea of trying to approximate an NP or Ortner pig palace car with a bit of kitbashing because these hi-cube stock cars are surprisingly common, and understandably cheap, at swap meets and I have acquired a small collection of them by virtue of my fondness for buying boxes of HO stuff, more or less sight unseen. It might actually take three of those cars to do the best job of approximating the NP cars.
It would be an approximation, not anywhere near as accurate as that nice brass model, nor as accurate as a true scratchbuilding job (which I would never get to anyway given other priorities), but could be “good enough” if I wanted to model one of these late in the day stock moves. And best of all since the cars are just sitting there, it would in essence be “free” and I like free stuff. I don’t know if anyone makes, or used to make, the decals.
By the way this is a bit OT but as some railroads found themselves with stock cars sitting idle, some of them would line the cars with plywood and press them into grain service during the fall grain rush. This continued into the 1960s and perhaps beyond. I have seen pics of Rock Island and C&NW stock cars lined and used this way. I don’t know if it was only the slatted sides that were lined or if the floors, having been subjected to decades of hauling frightened animals (and we all know what animals do
Yes, one or more of the toy train people did a normal Pig Palace, which is also prototypical. I have several of those normal pig palaces. I think mine are branded IHC or Mehano.
Kit bashing a BIG pig palace from them has been on my “to do” list for over two decades (since at the time I was modeling NP and I couldn’t afford the brass ones). As I recall, the last time I seriously considered starting the project there was some fairly major discrepancy that I could not figure out how to deal with. I don’t remember what it was but it was enough to make me know it would not be a weekend or even month end project, so I didn’t start.
“It was mentioned in the Car Builder’s Cyclopedia that one of the advantages to these pig palace cars, apart from their size, was that the interior was all smooth steel, with no rough wood or protruding nails to harm the animals”
They were facing something far worse at the end of their journey