I've been looking at old threads to gather information for inbound and outbound cars for breweries including this one:
http://cs.trains.com/mrr/f/13/t/214850.aspx
What I can't find is a definitive answer as to whether covered hoppers would have been used for grain shipments in 1956, the year my layout is set in, or whether it was all still being shipped in boxcars. If this was a transition period for covered hoppers, I can use the set I have already acquired but if it was all done in boxcars then, I need to make a change.
Thanks for the info. I did a little more googling and found a definitive date of 1958 for grain hauling in covered hoppers. I also found a thread I started back in 2006 under a different screenname in which I had asked pretty much the same question. I didn't remember starting the thread or the answers I had received but it confirmed 1958 as the earliest date for grain hauling in covered hoppers. The article I found indicated that covered hoppers had been used for hauling other commodities much earlier than that, but 1958 seems to be the earliest date for grain hauling. That will allow me to use my covered hoppers for other purposes. Since I have no other industries on the layout that would use covered hoppers, mine will be used in bridge traffic only.
Start in 1958 doesn't mean common in 1958. It will take over a decade for grain in covered hoppers to become dominent. Elevators will have to be built to load covered hoppers and facilities will have to be built to unload covered hoppers.
An easy way to tell is to locate some breweries in the era in which you are interested. Then go to historicaerials.com and find a aerial photo in the era or just after it and see if there are covered hoppers in use.
Dave H. Painted side goes up. My website : wnbranch.com
I agree with dehusman. Grain delivery in covered hoppers in the 1950s would have been in the "let's give this a try and see how it goes" category, perhaps in Airslide cars? For one thing most places that received grain shipments probably were not set up for unloading between the rails and transporting to the elevators (from covered hoppers) but rather to the sides of the rails (from boxcars) and to the elevators until such time as the number of covered hoppers reached critical mass.
Car Builder's Cyclopedias of the late 1950s era to 1960 suggest that grain was at most only starting to become a potential load for covered hoppers -- it was rather light a load in a sense for the short 2 bay covered hopper prototypes of the time, the kind used for sand or sugar and such dense heavy loads. The real economical hauling of grain in covered hoppers was a creature of the larger covered hoppers of the 1960s and beyond - including the famous Big John hopper of the Southern Railroad.
Even then the covered hopper vs. boxcar with 6 foot door decision was often a product of the capacity of the rail line used, some of them pretty marginal and mostly used only during the fall grain rush. That continued into the early 1980s at least. Then came the demise not only of the 40 ft boxcar with six foot doors but also many small town grain elevators, and the branch lines that served them.
One of Jeff Wilson's industries books for Kalmbach includes a Dick Cecil photo at Milwaukee's Beer Line (which served Schlitz primarily but also Pabst and Blatz to a lesser extent) and a Chicago Great Western boxcar (by that time actually owned by the C&NW) with paper door for grain delivery. Similarly some of the grain and malt elevators on Milwaukee's south side that also served the brewing industry were getting both covered hoppers and boxcars in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and presumably by that time their infrastructure was set up to receive from both sources.
Dave Nelson