What is or was the strangest or most iteresting load or RR car you have ever seen?
I was going to model an interesting depressed center flat car load and thought maybe the question might bring some cool pix or replies in this forum.
The strangest I think I ever saw was, at night some time late 1987, a train of white cars, each aprox. 70’ long not quite as tall as a stanard box car with a large, maybe 5’ or 6’ tall, “A” and “B” on each end, headed West between Lime and LaGrand, Oregon.[%-)]
See - “They” do exist!
Double stack well cars loaded with ties.
A hi-rail weed sprayer owned by Washburn Agricutural Services of Davis Ca. It consisted of a modified conventional highway tractor pulling a trailer. In addition to chemical tanks and spray equipment, the trailer had a control cabin made from a cab-over tractor body mounted on it. I last saw it on the SP in Marysville Ca in 1986 or 87.
A railroad car caring another railroad car…
That’s actually not all that rare. Most often wreck damaged cars headed to the shop for repair.
I think the most interesting load I’ve seen was several flatcars carrying an oil well drill rig and its auxiliary equipment/vehicles.
This one may be the winner:
Flat car carrying a fire engine behind a CNW 4-4-0 locomotive. Not a new steamer being delivered, but a working Chicago fire engine complete with crew in turnout gear loaded up to be sent to a major fire in another city (Milwaukee, I believe) in 1902. The draft horses were provided by the town with the fire.
This is not the only instance of this; in fact, it was more or less “common.”
There also was a major fire at the Union Stockyards in Chicago in 1934. The CB&Q at the request of the shorthanded Chicago Fire Department initiated a “mercy” train in Quincy on the Mississippi River and picked up fire engines and crews loaded on flatcars at towns all along the way. It was a huge fire, involving nearly one square mile. The Chicago FD sent out an urgent plea for mutual aid, and towns all across Illinois responded.
I know this because an engine from Macomb, Illinois was on that train. I was told there were 28 pumpers with crews behind those locomotives by the time it arrived in Chicago, and the men spent two long days fighting the fire.
They picked up ten locomotives on one stop in Galesburg, all from neighboring towns – including two from Peoria and two from the Quad Cities area. The fire crews had some fun along the way, taking turns blowing the engines’ sirens as they sped through the small towns. The CB&Q opened up the line all the way straight through. They also picked up a second engine in Mendota as the train grew longer, I was told, and double-headed at full throttle through the night, sirens and whistles blowing frantically, all the way to Chicago.
At times like this, one experiences the camaraderie shared among firefighters from different departments. The Chicago FD provided the visiting crews with dry gloves and socks, donuts, ham sandwiches and pails of cold beer to sake their thirst and replace fluids lost to the heat and exertion. I can tell you from firsthand experience how wonderful an ice-cold be
csxs’ track inspection car.looks like a giant winnebago on rails.
stay safe
joe
I look for the strange stuff, and have seen almost anything that’s out there (I say “almost”, because “just when you think you’ve seen everything…”). This includes the instruction car from GATX, painted up to look like a “little red schoolhouse”, and some now-extinct wooden vinegar tank cars.
But I still think my favorite sightings were a couple of tank cars with prominent “Baker’s Chocolate” markings. This was in the late 1970s, but the paint job looked like it would have been at home fifty years earlier. At least one of the observed cars was fairly new at the time.
There are, or were at various times, companies that owned exactly one car, as shown in the Equipment Registers. I’ve been lucky to see some of those, too.
Hey Carl!
A bit off topic…
I was on my way to Joliet on Thursday and saw a train headed east towards Proviso with engines in C&NW and FerroMex paint leading the way. This was near Glen Ellyn at the overpass between Crescent Blvd and Hill Ave. Did you happen to see it when it came your way? I’d never seen a FerroMex engine this far north and was pleased to see one of the few units still in C&NW Green and Yellow. Just thought I’d drop a line about it!
Mike
I once saw a used-up container platform on another used-up container platform, on top of yet another one, on a TTX flat. I said to a fellow railfan “business must be up, they’re letting them[censored]!” “Yeah, that’s one way to fix the equipment shortage! That’s what they do for used-up race horses! Why not platforms?” Needless to say, it wasn’t an intellectual discourse to say the least![D)][(-D][(-D] In the immortal words of Larry the Cable Guy: Git-R-Done!
The strangest looking piece of railroad equipment that I’ve ever seen in Europe are those specialized flatcars that carry whole standard gauge freight cars (trucks and wheel sets included) on meter gauge track. DB (Germany), OBB (Austria), and SBB (Switzerland) employ these contraptions rather than transfering the loads between standard gauge and narrow gauge equipment.
The strangest piece of prototype equipment that I’ve seen in the U.S. are those privately owned passenger cars that are a combination of vista dome in the middle and open-platformed observation cars on the end(s). I can’t ever recall seeing anything like that assigned to any Class 1’s passenger pool in the pre-Amtrak era. Even the Rock Island’s “Aero Train” (now on display at the National Museum of Transportation near Saint Louis) looks positively stately in comparison.
Of course, if we’re splittin’ hairs here, the Lionel aquarium car, bobbing giraffe’s head car, or a pink Lionel steam locomotive REALLY look weird to me.
Cheers!
I was thinking of Ed’s pics of the wind power generators. The pics were something to see alone. I can’t even imagine seeing it in person.[:D]
Mike
You should see 'em set up and running…
I’ve been hearing about them, Mike, but haven’t seen one in person recently. Actually, where you saw them is one of the more likely places for me to see 'em, too.
Baker’s Chocolate had a plant in Dorchester, Mass, and I saw some of those Baker’s tankers, and other cars being shunted in and around that plant when I walked to school at St’ Gregory’s in Dorchester.
Sam
Carl : Go east northeast of Bloomington, there is a whole gaggle of those rascals going in there right now (Arrowsmith on NS, Horizon Energy)…[:D][:D][:D]
How about the Schnabel Cars? In the November 2005 Forum there was a really good photo spread by redflasher and I think, also Coborn 35 had some photos in it of a move to Alberta of some refinery units, off of a heavy lift ship in Duluth, Mn. Not tomention Ed Blysard had some photos of a move out of the Port of Houston by BNSF.
This is the Link:
The accompanying photos were pretty awsome.
SCHNABEL CAR PICS FROM DULUTH,MN
TRAINS Magazine Forums » Railroads
Posted by redflasher Posted: 02 Dec 2005, 07:55:52
Here’s a link to some spectacular pictures of a Schnabel car doing some heavy duty hauling in Duluth, MN
http://www.lswci.com/schnabel2005.html
Sam
Aquarium cars
Boxcar in China carrying remains of Peking Man
Nuclear waste trains in the Nevada underground
WWII cars carrying the amphib vehicles
Car carrying corpse of Lincoln
etc etc
Here is another site with the CEBX 800 / 72 wheel / 880 ton Schnabel car and some more text on these unusual cars. ENJOY http://home.att.net/~Berliner-Ultrasonics/rrschnb0.html
This one…
http://165.91.110.43/trains/NewBNSF/PTRA.htm
The locomotive was brand new, this is it’s first revenue move.(it was also in the Trains photo of the day a few days ago, heading up a grain train)
the rest of the story…
http://perroux.us/pages/reactor.html
And the unusual…meter gauge EMD export locomotives, GM12s and GM16s on flats headed to Argentina…
A entire train, made up of ex BN B30-7As, (cabless booster units, GE B30s), at least 15 of them, pulled by a pair of new Dash 9s, headed to Texas Terminals to be loaded on board a ship, then off to Brazil, where they are fitted with narrow gauge trucks to be used on their dual gauge tracks.
A few photos from a buddy of mine in Brazil, GE Dash 9s on four narrow gauge B trucks, thing looks like it should fall over first curve it takes!
The wind fan trains already mentioned, each blades alone is over 100 feet long, one blade per flat, so it takes three flats per blade, one to carry the blade, two idler flats to separate them…each “fan” has three blades, average 20 fans per train, with two or more nacelles, (generators/hub assembly) and pylon sections on their own flats, it makes for a long, long train.
The Chinese Steamers…
And my all time favorite…a CNW box car, inside a SP box car, with a small GATX tankcar inside that…all chained down on a KLR heavy duty flat…the left overs of a wreck where the cars telescoped into each other, I guess it was to much work to try and separate them, they just welded braces over the ends, and dumped it all on a flat headed to the scrappers…
Ed