Brake system photo- PRR 40' OB boxcar

[Anonymous]

I am looking for a photo or good drawing of the brake system for a PRR 40' outside braced steel door boxcar. Thanks.

[ndbprr]

I don't think the PRR ever had outside braced boxcars. You can find nearly all freight and passenger car diagrams on Rob Schonburgs web site. Just do a Googlesearch using his name and you should find it.

[orsonroy]

You're talking about the Pennsy's X23 boxcars. Westerfield recently came out with a model of this car, and has a couple of photos of their model's underframe posted online:

www.westerfield.biz

Head towards the bottom of the page, click on PRR X23, and scroll down until you come across the photos. Westerfield cars are some of the most meticulously researched models anywhere, so you can trust the documentation.

[Anonymous]

Thanks. From information on the Schoenberg site ( http://prr.railfan.net/) it appears the model I have by Accurail may be of a Canadian prototype although it is marked PRR. It is marked as a PRR X26 although that didn't mean anything to me until I looked at the website above. Learning never stops.

[orsonroy]

Ah...THAT car.

The Accurail 9 panel car is a CN prototype (with the wood ends), which is a copy of the USRA single sheathed car (which had 5/5/5 steel ends).

If the car you have has steel ends, then it's an OK stand-in for a Pennsy-owned USRA SS box (Pennsy class X26). The Pennsy had 9900 of these cars (!). The best thing you can do to this car to make it more correct is to remove the fishbelly underframe members and replace them with .06"x.156" plastic strips. (The CN car DID have a fishbelly underframe, which is overkill for a SS car). The Westerfield site also has photos of the underframes of their USRA SS boxcar kits.

[ndbprr]

OOps! forgot about the X23 and X26.

[dknelson]

A Wayner Publications book I have of PRR equipment diagrams suggests that in addition to the X-23 and X-26 (which the book identifies as a USRA design), the X-38B was also outside braced (but longer than 40')
According to a letter in the July 1971 Model Railroader, page 14, the September 1970 issue of The Keystone had a major article on the X-23. That same letter corrected some errors in a drawing of the X-23 that appeared in the April 1971 issue of MR page 36. But following that article was a construction article that had some info on the car.

Also an old index I have shows that RMC published drawings of X-23 in Jan \uary 1947 page 17; July 1955 page 40, and October 1960 page 33. I do not have those issues to see what they show for brake system photos.

By the way another Wayner book called The Cars of the Pennsylvania Railroad has photos of some of the real oddities in the PRR roster. One box car had ends that looked like a bullseye, or like the bottom of a grapefruit juice can.
Dave Nelson

[rrinker]

haha yeah, I'll say they had cars like that - there's even a picture of one in Reading Company in Color Vol 1. The main subject is, of course, a Reading train, but a passing train on a bridge over the subject has a nice PRR outside braced boxcar right there in the middle.

--Randy

[ndbprr]

By the way, there is no such thing as an outside braced box car. The proper term used by the railroads is a "single shetahed box car". Not that it will change anything. We will still all know what the person means.

[dknelson]

Interesting
Is there a reason why a single sheathed car could not have inside bracing?
Dave Nelson

[orsonroy]

QUOTE: Originally posted by dknelson

Interesting
Is there a reason why a single sheathed car could not have inside bracing?
Dave Nelson

Actually, yes: history and the evolution of engineering and physics, as well as cargo loading requirements.

The first boxcars were double-sheathed. That is, they (usually) had horizontal boards on the inside of the car, wooden trusses, and vertical sheathing on the outside. That's the way boxcars were built, because that's the way barns and houses were built. They were OVERbuilt, because no one had bothered to really conduct stress testing to determine just how little material car builders could get away with.

The first single sheathed cars were experiments in material conservation (cost cutting), and actually came rather late in the history of railroading, 1900 or so. I believe the first mass-produced single sheathed cars were the Pennsy's X23. If you notice, these cars have a steel support frame, just like any "traditional" SS car. But the Pennsy's engineers didn't trust the internal sheathing to support the car sides without buckling, so they added all those horizontal support brackets to the cars as stiffeners. Once the AAR and railroad engineers started looking into the issue, they realized cars didn't need the horizontal members, and conventional-looking SS cars were born.

And why were SS cars built with the sheating on the insude? Simple: internal sheathing is there to protect the car loads from banging into sharp edges. Even steel boxcars had intermal wood sheathing, to provide a nice smooth box inside that facilitated loading. And boxcars were regularly used to haul bulk comodities like grains. Having outside sheathing only would allow grain to hide out in nooks & crannies, or even to spill out of the car.