I’m trying to determine what pieces of rolling stock should have the home road name when modeling a fueling facility during the early 40s. Obviously, “industries” on a steam/diesel terminal track would expend coal, sand, and diesel fuel while creating ash/cinder, which needed to be removed.
I’m not sure it this is correct or not but logic would dictate to me the following in regards to the use of home road name cars vs. non-home road name cars:
Coal (hopper) - Doesn’t really matter because so many RRs carried it
Sand (gondola) - Home road name?
Diesel fuel (tanker) - Non-home road name. Were there any specific companies that carried diesel fuel while others did not?
Ash/cinder removal (gondola or hopper) - Since ash and cinder were generated by the home RR, a home road name would normally carry it?
I could see coal, sand, and diesel fuel being purchased directly from a manufacturer, distributor, or possibly another RR. And it seems to me that RRs would generally use their own cars for dealing with ash though.
Does this reasoning seem far-fetched? Thanks for the help. [:D]
The PRR used home road cars as you would say. They usually had a large letter S in yellow paint on the upper left sides of the cars used for company stores service. Not too many railroads owned tank cars in the early bulk oil and fuel days. Non home cars would not sit for very long to avoid per diam charges. The loads would be unloaded as fast as possible into storage tanks. A road as large as the PRR got coal from their own company mines and used their own cars to haul it. Manufactured parts were hauled in company lettered stores cars maintained for interchange with other roads. Cinders were considered a waste product and used as fill and yard ballast so it would be carried in MOW cars or something just this side of the scrap yard.
Actually it would be the home road or the road on which the mine supplying the coal was located.
Actually more likely a covered hopper from the home road.
Most likely either a home road tanker, fuel was one of the few things railroads owned tank cars to carry. If not a home road then a private owner (ends in the letter X, SHPX, UTLX, GATX, etc)
It would depend on the railroad - a large railroad might have it’s own source of sand and so use a “company service” covered hopper to move sand to it’s engine facilities. Otherwise, if the sand was coming from off the railroad, it could be in a car lettered for any railroad (not necessarily the one on which the sand shipper was located.) Unless the railroad owned it’s own coal source, the same would probably go for coal.
Generally ashes would be moved in an old gondola car owned by that railroad. Since it was in company service and didn’t leave the railroad, it wasn’t subject to ICC rules so could be very old with archbar trucks, even after those were outlawed for interchange.
Some railroads did have company service tank cars for oil for diesel fuel, others would get them from the outside and the cars would be lettered for a lease company (like UTLX) and/or lettered for an oil company.
A feature to keep in mind is some road such as the SP color coded their converted company tank cars: yellow for gasoline, green for kerosene, orange for diesel. But they also had several 50 foot tank cars specifically built for dispensing kerosene at remote locations, these wore solid aluminum and were confined to home rails. For Jack of all trade duties, the universal to SP GS gondola served every conceiveable purpose and was a fixture on all company service trains when not occupied with revenue generating duties.
As I recall the Santa Fe even had tank cars dedicated to water service. In steam days, they sometimes had to bring carloads of water to a desert location to use to fill up a water tank for the steam engines.
If it’s the early 1940s, then covered hoppers are probably not in company sand service. These cars were relatively rare then, mostly brand new and generally in restricted service assigned to specific shippers. Yes, these first cars later came into wide use for company sand, but not until they were replaced by newer cars.
The Rio Grande NG lines shipped sand for loco use in boxcars. Other lines likely used gons, as solid floor ones wouldn’t leak much, unlike a typical hopper car or drop bottom gon. Era tends to suggest that these sorts of cars were more likely in company sand service during the early 40s.
Of course they’re exceptions to the rules especially if there wasn’t a coal mine on the railroad then the coal would arrive in a foreign road car.
Diesel fuel could arrive in a GATX or UTLX tank car.The fuel could arrive by truck as well from a nearby fuel distributor.
Sand could arrive in foreign road cars as well.
Look beyond the the wisdom of books and look to the prototype and you may see another picture that the author overlooked or was completely ignorant of.
As freight cars age /aged… they would fall off of the interchange registry. Memory has me recalling this number at 35 years. That meant that older equipment could no longer be used in interchange hauling and was either scrapped or placed into maintenance of way service. Short hoppers often became ballast hoppers and also beet haulers on company lines and beet spurs.
If you are modeling the 40’s there would be a lack of equipment that would be 35 years old as that would put the dates into the pre-USRA era and little equipment survived those rules… wood frames, truss rods and arch bar trucks.
There were a lot of riveted iron fish belly cars that did roll around for many years in MOW service into the 1950’s. Most were clearly marked as such, as some car straying out onto some other line now became freight. An expensive operation for a near derelict freight car.
