What type of cars at a paper mill ?

[Anonymous]

What type of cars would be seen at paper mills in the 40's ?

[Anonymous]

Chip cars, box cars for finished product, tank cars for bleach, and gondolas for scrap wood if the mill had an onsite chipper. Starch is also used alot in the paper process and it probably came in box cars for that time as well.

[dehusman]

In the 1940's would have had pulpwood flats more than chip hoppers.

Dave H.

[ericsp]

Model Railroader did a couple of articles on paper mills in the late 1990s. One was on modern paper mills, the other was on paper mills a few decades ago, I don't remember what decade.

[johncolley]

If the mill produced newsprint paper or brown kraft paper for cardboard boxes it would be in large rolls and would take double door boxcars probably 50 ft.

[Anonymous]

I model in the present day, but most likely you would have seen a lot of boxcars for the finished product. Gondolas definitely, because there is a lot of scrap wood.

[ndbprr]

By the way, up here in the north most of the newsprint boxcars are CN, CV, DW&P or CP since most of it comes from Canada.

[leighant]

I model 1950s. A couple not everybody might guess:

A. E. Staley Co of Decatur, Iowa shipped "custom engineered starch" to Kraft paper mills for stiffening corrugated cardboard used in boxes. Intermountain makes the Staley tankcar in both HO and N I believe.

In 1970s, ProTex had tankcars for lignosulfate, byproduct of paper mills used as a "dispersing agent" when setting concrete.

PDAX 1050 Protex PDA (Protex Dispersing Agent)
3 dome TM blt 1920
used for calcium or sodium lignosulfonate, paper mill byproduct used in setting concrete
1980 pix at Lawndale team track, HB&T Houston:
Prototype Modeler Dec81 p.38

PDAX 1054 Protex Industries blt 1920s 3 dome
not listed April 1954 Official Railway Eqpt Register
A Rolling Pipeline of Colorful Tank Cars: Classic
Freight Cars Vol.2" p.53 1973 color pix at Denver
(note: I run this car on my layout, which represents a line connecting the East Texas piney woods and its Louisiana border area paper mills, to the Houston area. For ten years, I had the idea of making a custom decal for this car and then saw a photo of beginner layout on internet with three PDAX tankcars. Model Power had made it for about a year or two (PDAX 1054) and I didn’t know about it until it was out of production. I bought one on eBay after being unable to find it from regular dealers. I paid $4 for the car and about equal shipping. My only model purchase ever on eBay and I consider a reasonable transaction for an item that really fits my layout and I might never find through visiting train stores, train shows, etc.)

[Anonymous]

The southern paper mills were basically of two types (1) Kraft paper mills - producing normally unbleached industrial papers and boards, for uses in corrugated boxes, cement bags and other bulk materials, and connsumer bags such as grocery bags, etc. (2) consumer papers mills -- producing lighter weight bleached business papers and newsprint.
In the 40's kraft paper mills would have received their raw material, pine logs in short 5 - 6 foot lengths (called billets), the billets would have been brought into the mill on trucks or rail cars - the railcars (pulpwood cars) would be flat cars with low (6 to 8') end bulkheads, the billets would be 4 - 5' long and loaded 2 across the car. The two stacks of billets were not interlaced so they could be more easly unloaded with mechanically equipment. Other materials used in the paper manufacturing could be brought in using box cars, for bagged materials, tank cars for liguid or gas additives.
The finished products would be loaded into "clean" box cars, with the rolls stacked on end inside the cars.