Hey guys,
What boxcars were in general use from about 1940-1950 to move dry goods and nonperish. I'm trying to model this time period fairly accurately and would like to know what is too early and what is too late?
Also, are there any references available as to what sort of traffic was moving through Michigan and Illinois during that period?
Thanks.
I'm not a railroad historian and I'm sure some of our historians can give you better answers, but for the most part wooden box cars 40 feet in length were the norm. Steel box cars didn't really come into use until after World War II was over and steel was more available. For your time range both 40 and 50 footers would be appropriate with a few of them being steel. On occasion you might find some older 36 footers being hauled, but they were being phased out during your time period.
Bill
Thanks. I was trying mostly to stick with wooden '40s anyway, as they just look very nice. I have a few steel '40s but not many. The layout I am working on models a fictional southern Michigan town in the winter of 1947, so I think I've been making proper roling stock choices. Thanks.
Actually,
By the late 30's most new cars where steel, or steel with wood sheathed sides, but old cars lasted many years and wood cars could be seen even in the early sixties.
40 and 50 foot cars where quite common, wood, steel, welded, rivited, smooth sided and outside braced. But most all would have steel ends and steel underframes.
What you would not have seen was old 36' cars, cars with wooden ends or truss rod frames would have been all gone or rebuilt.
Plug doors, extra long or tall, or cushioned underframes with the couplers sticking way out are all stuff that didn't start untill the 60's.
No arch bar trucks (outlawed in the 30's) and no rollerbearing trucks (just starting in the late 50's)
You would have seen the beginning of the flashy paint schemes, B&O time savers, NYC Pacesetters, but most cars would be box car red (oxide).
Sheldon
I'm not sure of the roller bearing trucks, Sheldon. The C&O had a special mark - a horizonal white line - on its new 1948 three bay steel hoppers. The marking was to denote how special they were and it soon vanished as roller bearings became more common. But I think you
re off by about ten years. :D
But yes, 36 footers would be out, there would still be plenty of wood and there would be lots of steel cars. And after 1943 there would be the composite hoppers and gons to save steel for the war effort.
While the boxcar heights were close - no hi cubes yet - there was a tremendous difference within a few feet of each other, and the same with door width, enough that there was a visual difference,
Gene
Gene,
Some roads started experimenting with roller bearing freight trucks in the early forties, but, they where the inclosed timken style like tender and passenger cars, not the kind we see on modern equipment. Those first showed up on covered hoppers and 75' piggybacks in '53, '54 but did not see use on boxcars until '57, '58.
Those early C&O hoppers had inclosed Timken bearing trucks, and that was really rare at that point. The poster asked about boxcars, and very few had roller bearings until the '60's.
That's why I buy the EB probucts roller bearing trucks, their right for my era.
Sheldon
No arch bar trucks in interchange service. They could be found on MW cars.
Sheldon;
I have to side with Gene on this one. I lived next to the Fore River interchange spur in Braintree, Mass in 1954, and saw a lot of railcars with Timken@ Roller Bearings on; implying that they were in pretty much widespread use by then.
I bought some Greenway Buckeye trucks recently with roller bearings on them. I have to use them on the Vanderbilt tenders on the Santa Fe rebuilts.; I don't feel out of place as the Lima S-3 Berkshires included them on their tenders.
RIch
In the 40's you may find plenty of USRA boxcars. Depending on your road, they may not have bought many during the Depression era of 1929-1939. With war approaching, many older cars were rebuilt. The "wood" cars most of us are talking about are the single or double sheathed ones. I'm not sure how long the wood carbody would last before needing to be replaced by a thrifty carshop.
Into the 50's more steel cars would be built. also, many of the "wood" cars would be rebuilt with steel sides. The PS1's may be the new caars, in both 40 & 50 ft lengths.
Your best guide will be the ORER's published by the NMRA. they fit into your time period perfectly. They will also give you names of the short lines in MI & IL & IN still in operation at the time. Then you may want to add a car or 2 from the AA, C&IM etc to your fleet of Class 1's GTW, PRR, NYC, IC, etc.
Rich and Gene,
I agree, and said, that Timken inclosed roller bearing trucks where in use starting about 1942 or so. They where in wide spread use on specific car types where the railroads where starting to push beyond the 50 ton range. specificly, 3 bay and 4 bay 40' hoppers, covered hoppers (mostly cement service), heavy duty flat cars, etc. But they where not common place on 40' and 50 ' box cars of that era. I'm sure a few rebuilds got them, and maybe even the newest production on some roads, but most 40' and 50' box cars had ASF 50 ton Ride Control or Bettendorf plain bearing designs until the very late 50's. Many of those ASF 50 ton trucks where on the rails until outlawed in 197?.
They would have also been seen under lots of tenders, a few cabooses, and express reefers and express box cars.
The more modern Symington or Hyatt style we see today did not appear until late in 1953 on the first 75' long piggy pack flats built by Beth Stell for the PRR and the Wabash.
Only a few correct HO models of these early roller bearing trucks have benn or are being made. I use the EB products ones on lots of my equipment, based on my research as outlined above. Most all of the roller bearing trucks on the market now and comming on RTR equipment are Hyatt or Symington types, not used until 1953 or so.
To back up my position, I refere you to Model Railroader, Dec 2003, pg 72, "Modeler's guide to freight car trucks - "Roller bearings trucks have been around since the turn of the 20th century and began to see common use in 1930s on passenger cars. Because of their additional cost, the trucks weren't widely used on freight equipment until the late 1950s and 1960s."
And, I'm sure I have more "facts" as apposed to anecdotal evidence if I dig out a few more books.
Sheldon
More info,
If Wikipedia is to be believed, Timken built a demo box car in 1943 to send around to the railroads, and it was displayed at the 1948 worlds fair.
That is right in line with what I have read elsewhere about Timken roller bearing frieght trucks first appearing in 1942.
In existance in the 40s. yes, common place, no. I did read the orginal post correctly, didn't I? He did ask about box cars from 1940 to 1950?
From Timkens own web site - their AP bearing, equal to the symington and Hyatt types (triangular spinning cap with three bolts) was introduced in 1954.
Sheldon
Gene,
Here's a link to a great article about those C&O hoppers with roller bearings and the fact that even in 54-56, roller bearing use was just starting.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3943/is_200203/ai_n9047611 (http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3943/is_200203/ai_n9047611)
It even talks about them being more common on hoppers and flats and Timken using that as promotional info.
Also,
Roller bearings required on new cars - 1963
Friction bearings banned - 1994
Sheldon
Sheldon,
What you said was "...no roller bearing trucks." That is a very general, broad statement.
Gene
And,
The conversation was about box cars. yes they may have been a few, but as a basic modeling guideline for 1940-1950, "no roller bearing trucks" on 40' and 50' box cars is a reasonable statement.
Sheldon
I think all of my questions have been answered. I didn't mean to start a fistfight, though. Sorry. Thanks to you all.
Swordsman422,
Not to worry, you didn't start anything, we do this all the time. Sometimes it ends in a draw, sometimes someone admitts defeat ( like I did recently in another thread). But no one takes it too seriously.
Good luck with your modeling.
Sheldon.
With Sheldon, fistfights are fine. It's when he reaches behind him to grab the shotgun that things get serious! ;D
Just for your informartion, Sheldon not only designed my free standing train barn, but threw in the track plan to put inside it as well.
Gene
To recap, the great perponderance of box cars from the 1930's through the 1950's was the standard 40-footer. Within that "standard" was a lot of variations--car height, car width, door sizes, etc. There was a fair amount of wood still about, especially during the war when the single-sheathed cars with metal ribs and wood sheating were common. And there were even a few double-sheathed wood cars, though with steel underframes. If you ran a mix of 1937 ARA cars, with a scattering of PRR-style "X-29"s and a couple of 50-footers, you would be off to a good start. As noted, arch-bar trucks were outlawed for interchange service. The large majority of cars had friction bearings. Roller bearings had been around for quite a while (the East Broad Top equipped one of their passenger cars with roller bearings back around 1930), but were essentially still an experiment into the 1940's.
OK, I'm seeing a lot of inaccuracies in the posts in this thread, so here's my two cents:
Quotefor the most part wooden box cars 40 feet in length were the norm. Steel box cars didn't really come into use until after World War II was over and steel was more available.
Definitely not true. By 1935, NO wood boxcars were being built. In the 20th Century, the first mass-produced all-steel boxcars were the NYC's 1916 auto cars. By 1918 the NYC started building the first of over 30,000 all-steel boxcars. By 1922 the Pennsy jumped into the act by creating the X29, and built 35,000 of them. The only roads that held out and continued to build wood cars were those Pacific Northwest roads that had the lumber industry as customers. Even then, those cars were generally steel car designs with wood substituting for the steel sides. During WWII a small number of single sheathed boxcars were built to save steel for the war effort, but at the same time, thousands of all steel boxcars were being built (for example, the ATSF took delivery of something like 10,000 all steel boxcars during the war)
By the beginning of WWII, the USA boxcar fleet was about 20% double sheathed, 35% single sheathed, and 45% steel. About 65% of those cars were 40 footers, 30% were shorter (36' to 38'), and 5% were 50 footers (about evenly split between all steel and single sheathed). I've crunched the numbers in the 1930, 1940 and 1950 ORERs to come up with these general figures, so everyone's welcome to check my math!
QuoteWhat you would not have seen was old 36' cars, cars with wooden ends or truss rod frames would have been all gone or rebuilt.
Not QUITE true. The NYC ran several hundred all wood-bodied 38 foot boxcars until about 1946. Any car listed in the ORER was available for interchange duty, and there are still a few hundred all wood cars listed in 1950, mostly working on shortlines (the national car fleet was around 700,000 boxcars, so the percentage IS miniscule). 6% of the national boxcar fleet was under 40 feet long in 1950, and there were still several thousand cars with trussrods running.
A few notes on appliance bannings:
Archbar trucks: 1940
"trussrod" underframes: 1952
K brakes: 1952
And actually, those are about the ONLY appliance bannings out there for this period. Vertical stem brake wheels were never banned. Various other truck types were never banned. Underframes with trussrods which also had a steel center sill were never banned. KD brakes were never banned. All-wood carbodies were never banned. All of these things just died a natural death on their own accounts, as old cars bit the dust and were replaced by more modern cars.
QuoteIn the 40's you may find plenty of USRA boxcars.
Not exactly true. By 1940, most of the USRA single sheathed boxcars were still running (23,557 out of 25,000 built), but the double sheathed boxcars were dying off fast. By 1940, only 17,000 out of the original 25,000 cars were still running in their original condition, and by 1950 that number had shrunk to 5047 cars (wood-bodied cars don't survive as long as all steel cars). By 1935 most roads had started rebuilding their remaining DS boxcars into all steel cars (before WWII, not after).
QuoteI'm not sure how long the wood carbody would last before needing to be replaced by a thrifty carshop.
Thrifty or not, 20 to 25 years. The paint of the era lasted 7 to 12 years, so a wood boxcar would have been repainted at least twice in that period.
In general, the originator of this thread is talking about three completely different eras. 1940-1945 saw a bare majority of wood-bodied boxcars, with a healthy sprinkling of shorter cars built in the 1900-1918 period. 1945-1955 saw a major change in the rail scene, with the railroads scrapping every short or wood boxcar they could find. The process would have taken less than ten years, but the car builders couldn't keep up with the orders (which is why large railroads like the NYC and IC built so many of their own cars). The period of 1955-1960 was about how we see most "transition era" model railroads: lots of the same types of 40 foot steel boxcars, a smaller number of 50 foot steel cars, and only one or two wood cars. By 1955 railroads were starting to experiment with flash paint schemes on their cars, but those really didn't take off until 1958, or the end of the steam era.
Ray,
Thanks for the added detail. I was working from memory and was pretty close on most of that. I was trying to give the poster some general guidelines without writing a book or pulling any off the shelf.
In modeling it always seems more approperate to model what was common place, not the one exception or rarest piece you can come up with. I based my comments on that view, knowing there may be an exception/inaccuracy or two.
I based my color scheme comment mainly on my knowledge of the B&O. They introduced their "Sentinel Service" (silver car) in 1947 and repainted a number of cars to advertise that service. Their next flashy paint scheme was in 1950 with the "Time Saver" (blue and orange car) by the end of the 50s, the B&O was getting way from those fancy schemes, but then went back to solid blue w/silver roofs in the mid 60's as new the 50' cushioned cars began to appear.
Sheldon
36 footers still represented between 10 and 15 percent of the total boxcar fleet in 1950. More than half were owned by Canadian roads, though.
Swordsman;
Not to worry...Neither of those guys are any good at fisticuffs...
BTW: Both Gene and Sheldon are extremely knowledgeable and good gentlemen. I am proud to have them as co-contributors (?) on this forum.
Rich
"...And in this corner, wearing white shorts..."
Fisticuffs, no. But give me two days to practice and I'll part your hair with an M-14 at 600 meters. <SEG> (And don't even think about what I can do right now with a radio and a pair of 7x50 binos!
Gene
And,
My handgun instructor (a retired army shooting range instructor) said I was one of only three in a class of 40 he would pick for a shooting team.
Sheldon
I was an army shooting range instructor - years ago. My first assignment after learning to employ artillery!
Gene
I like calling in airstrikes the best. ::)
Just to add a bit more trivia to this discussion..
The WAG (Wellsville, Addison & Galeton Railroad), a small shortline in northern PA -southern NY was famous in the 1970's for two things:
F-units and wooden boxcars! :o
The wooden cars were still being used in interchange service as late as 1974.
(http://i165.photobucket.com/albums/u45/scottychaos/sole-1.jpg)
Scot
Sorry, Gene; I had my fill of guns, rifles, automatic weapons, ad nauseum long ago. On my uniform is an expert medal-among others that mean a little more to me than firing an M-16 at 600 metres.
As far as protection goes, I have my dog and my good uncle Louie, which has been lead filled, bird shot, so that it won't bounce when I swing it.
BTW: You will NEVER part my hair (and I have hair)-because I am not ever going to be down range. I am going to be home watching the Patriots with my buds, drinking same.
Rich
Rich,
Not to go too far a field here, not to start a debate, but personal views can be interesting and telling.
Guns - I grew up with them, learned about them early, satisfied any boyish curiosity and was truely indifferent for years - until a bunch of socialists starting telling me I was too dumb, too reckless, or too something to own one and that I had no right to protect myself, my family and my property. Than I got reinterested real fast.
Sports - never got truly interested. A Sunday drive with my wife (often to a train watching venue), beats any "game" I ever watched (and I once had Orioles season tickets).
Beer - have not drank in a decade or more. Never drank much before that. Never had any problems with it myself, but never saw any pleasure in it either. But I have seen it ruin a lot of peoples lives (including my first wife and a lot of her family).
To each their own, I have no problem with those who drink responsably, but I don't need or want it. More money for trains!
For me, I say "I used to be well rounded until I figured out what I really liked".
Sheldon
Sheldon;
Perhaps because of my contribution, but this has gone too far now. We should get back to trains.
Rich
Yesterday in South Dakoda, off I-90 on the south side was a "frontier museum" with 40' wooden boxcar- at 75+ it was hard to see much more than that - but frontier it was not.
Gene
Gene;
At Connecticut Valley Railroad", there is, at the entrance, a string of cars (static) headed by a rather diminutive 2-6-2. Most of these cars would be classed as "antiquity", but I doubt if any of them are pre-1900. They do have that "appeal" though-the kind that makes us want to rush right home and start work on those freight cars...
Rich
Rich,
I saw that string of cars there a few years ago. You are correct, most are of 1905-1920 construction. I have a few photos here somewhere, but alas, no way to post them at present.
Sheldon