I have been setting up a 1990 era layout and have discovered that my collection of rolling stock has a far greater % of boxcars than the prototype does. From reasearch I have done, it seems modern trains contain more covered hoppers, tank cars and various other specility cars than they do box cars. When did this occur? I recall seeing steam era photos of trains consisting of nothing but boxcars but today your lucky see more than a half dozen boxcars in an entire train!
Seems my boxcar collection is dated also, most of mine have rooftop walkways, I read somewhere they were outlawed at some stage. Is there a way to modify them so they would fit in on a 1990 era layout?
Back in the steam era, the majority of cargo was shipped in boxcars. There weren’t really any covered hoppers at that point - they started coming out fairly late. Bulk commodities like grain, cement, potash, sugar, flour, etc. were shipped either bulk (loose) or bagged in boxcars. Today pretty much any bulk or powdered commodity is shipped in specialized covered hoppers. Lumber was also shipped in boxcars, loaded by hand board-by-board. Now speicialized centrebeam flatcars and bulkhead flatcars carry pretty much all board lumber, although plywood and veneer is still shipped in boxcars, with large double doors for easy loading by forklifts.
Liquids and gases have always been shipped in tank cars. Although in early periods I’m sure barrels in boxcars also happened.
Coal was typically shipped in hoppers or gondolas but could sometimes be shipped in old boxcars as well.
Another factor for the decline of boxcars is competition from trucks and intermodal, however there still is a fair amount of traffic carried by rail in boxcars.
And I’m sure much larger volumes of chemicals and related products are shipped by rail today - especially plastics which were new or non-existant in the steam days.
The deregulation laws passed in the early 1980’s caused railroads to do a 180 degree turn from being against containers (which they saw as just being part of the trucking industry, therefore a competitor) to being in favor of them. As noted, items carried by boxcar earlier in the 20th c. were being carried by specialized cars by then, but that change to containers was a big one. I remember that by 1984 it wasn’t unusual to see trains of pretty much just flatcars with containers going by (although IIRC ‘double stacks’ came later).
Roofwalks on house cars (boxcars, reefers, stock cars) were outlawed in the mid-1960’s from interchange service, but there were some extensions so some cars with roofwalks and high-mounted brake wheels did go into the 1970’s. Any car built after the mid-sixties would not have been built with roofwalks, and by say 1980 any car being used in interchange service that had been built with roofwalks would have had them removed.
You can remove the roofwalks, depending on the type of car (i.e. Athearn, MDC, etc.) it might be hard to remove the holes for where the roofwalk casting is connected to the body. I would check the boxcar paint schemes too, it might be the cars are decorated in paint schemes that you wouldn’t still be seeing in the 1990’s. If so, it might be easier to just go get some ‘modern’ boxcars.
Less-than-carload freight was dying quickly around 1960, and that loss of freight source really knocked the knees under the need for box cars, particularly the 40-footers. Also, the introduction of covered hoppers which became wider spread in the 1960s such as for grain and other bulk granular materials took that traffic away from box cars. There was a subsequent shortage of box cars a couple decades later and many shortlines had a lot of box cars made to take advantage of increased per diem charges. This situation was later reversed, and these railroads ended up with a lot of unused box cars.
my, how things do change. one of the first jobs i had while still going to school was in the ICRR car shops in Memphis. we had several lines outfitting 50’ box cars. the cars were being built or stretched at the Centralia Ill shops and sent to Memphis for installation of checkered steel floor sheets and to have the trucks reconditioned. the NYC was doing a similar box car rebuilding program at Beech Grove Ind. in 1967. MDT still had a repair shop at Mitchell Ill for conventional ice reefers then and shortly afterward MP started converting former ART reefers to box cars for flour loading at the ART shop in St Louis
50’ was considered a long car in the early 60’s and when i was working on the road, the timetables showed siding capacity based on 50’ cars.
funny to think how so much of what was important back then went the way of child labor and high button shoes.
come to think of it, in the late 60’s the Q still had a few of the old wooden side coal hoppers in revenue service.
I wondered why the building supply place (larger of the two rail served) was still getting box cars. The other place still gets a few box cars, but don’t know what for. They get spotted on basically a team track since they don’t connect with any building or platform. The company makes animal products like tallow so they might be used to ship out hides or something. They also get covered hoppers, mostly PS2-CD’s from what I’ve seen, and tank cars which I assume is what the tallow is put it. Either way few days I got to talk to a RR worker who was comparing a list and writting down car #‘s, he said company makes 8-10 loads a day. That also explains why the company has their own small yard, trains don’t always come through every day. Think I mentioned this before, but the companies small yard looks like it can hold around dozen and a half cars, and the small fiddle yard usually has a dozen or so mix of tank and covered hoppers waiting. There is also one small business that I noticed a single box car spotted by last week but I don’t know what they are. Their spur must only be long enough for a single car and it is hidden byt he business itself from the road. It’s in an area with a bunch of different business’ all put next to each other so unless I walked the rail to see which one the car was spotted by and then walked around the business’ yard I won’t find out. All the box’s I see in area are 50 footers though, they seem to be high-cube cars but I will have to check on that. But watching the crews work in the local CN yard you would be hard pressed to believe box cars aren’t as common any more. By the by, what RR is the “J” logo from in the OP’s profile thingy? There was a train like that in the CN yard few weeks ago but of course, I didn’t have a camera on me to take a picture. As I remember it was all orange, and just had that “Big J” logo or whatever it is thats it. Well a road # too but I don’t remember it.
Does the count for intermodal count cars or platforms?
If the OP’s cars still have high roofwalks and brake wheels they probably won’t be typical of 1990 era boxcars in their overall design, probably 1930’s or 1940’s design cars.
Car mix is highly dependent on the area you are modeling. If you model the UP N-S line through Ft Worth you will rarely see any intermodal car and see lots of coal cars. If you model the E-W line through Ft Worth you will see lots of intermodal cars and very few coal cars. If you model a area with paper mills or auto parts business, you will see lots of boxcars. If you model an area with lots of mines or steel mills, you will see fewer boxcars.
This brought up a thought that has been buggin me for the last few days. When did usage of 40’ box cars die down? The box cars that get spotted around the area I live in are all 50 footers, I have to check but they also all might be high-cube cars not sure. This all also brings to mind the odd ball sizes, 53 foot 6 inch Evans, 60 foot AFC, the 89’ foot quad-door auto box cars.
It appears to me that by the 1960s, new 40’ boxcars were the exception rather than the rule. I have seen photographs of 40’ boxcars in the 1980s that I would guess are in revenue service (i.e. N&W on SP). If you were to plot the amount of 40’ boxcars versus time, I have no idea what that graph would look like.
SP did buy 100 ton, 40’ boxcars for copper service in 1972, 1973-1974, and 1977.
I saw a MKT 40’ boxcar in a UP work train a couple of years ago.
I imagine it would look something like a classic bell curve. There were some 40’ woodsided boxcars c.1900 but not many. By the 1920’s new construction of all-wood, all-steel, or composite boxcars would have been almost all 40’ cars. This would continue into the thirties and forties, although the cars by the mid-thirties were “high cars” of 10’ height.
These 40’ cars would stay in service for many years, but the building of new ones would steeply decline after about 1950 in favor of 50’ steel cars (which started to be built in the mid-to-late thirties), and later 60’ cars.
By the seventies you often only saw 40’ cars in specialized service like grain trains, or being used on branch lines with light rail, and by the eighties they were getting to be rare. They weren’t completely gone - I remember seeing some 40’ cars still in use in Thunder Bay Ontario in 1986 for example - but they were much less common than 50’ or 60’ cars.
I suspect when railroads had to remove roofwalks and do other work on cars in the sixties-seventies they may have chosen just to scrap many of their 40’ boxcars at that point??
Boxcars seem to be quite alive and well down here in Alabama. Last night when me and the little girl (my 2-1/2 year old daughter) watched Q650 come through Troy, AL, she was pulling about 30 box cars, 10 centerbeams, 25 covered hoppers, 6 refridgerated boxes, and the rest were tank cars (all in all 119 cars, 3 locomotives: GP40-2 #6017, ES44AC #738, and ES44DC #5212).
“By the by, what RR is the “J” logo from in the OP’s profile thingy? There was a train like that in the CN yard few weeks ago but of course, I didn’t have a camera on me to take a picture. As I remember it was all orange, and just had that “Big J” logo or whatever it is thats it. Well a road # too but I don’t remember it.”
The J logo you are refering to is that of the Elgin, Joliet and Eastern Railway. Also known as the ‘Chicago Outer Belt’ or simply ‘The J’ Their line runs a ‘loop’ around Chicago from Wakegan to Gary with major yards in Joliet and Gary. They interchage with with every major railroad that comes into Chicago, which is pretty much every major railroad in the country. They were for many decades owned by US Steel, they were sold earlier this year to CN, which would explain why you saw one of their locomotives in a CN yard. You most likely saw one of their SD38s, which they own more of than anyone, (except UP who aquired them through various mergers) For more info see
