Over 40 years and three layouts I have accumulated a lot of locos and rolling stock, many of which don't fit the era and or location of my current layout. I have way more freight cars than I could ever put on the layout at one time and even swapping them on and off the layout in a fiddle yard I have way more than I need. The time has come to unload the excess and my LHS buys used equipment which is more covenient than selling it piecemeal on ebay. As for what to get rid of, some of the choices are easy. They don't fit the era. Also since my first two layout were of western railroads, I have way too many cars from those roads for my current eastern railroad so I need to thin those out as well. Some of the calls are a little more difficult. In particular I have four old time box cars which I believe were sold by Roundhouse. I really like these cars but I wonder if they belong on the layout. They are 40 footers but have a much lower profile than the boxcars one would typically see in the 1950s which is my era. In addition, the brake wheels are on vertical posts and rise above the roofline. As best I can read the service date on these, it appears they are all from the 1920s. How feasible is it that they would still be in service on a Class 1 railroad in 1956 which is the year my railroad is set in.
PS. Please don't tell me that it's my railroad. I know that and have no interest in using that as a crutch. I don't want something on my layout that doesn't belong.
PRR X29's have a pretty low profile, and they were certainly around in 1926.
What you pretty much have to have is a steel underframe (truss rods are OK) and AB brakes.
I believe the old Roundhouse "little" boxcars were 36' cars with a wood underframe and K brakes. So they wouldn't be available for interchange.
Ed
NYBW-John...Some of the calls are a little more difficult. In particular I have four old time box cars which I believe were sold by Roundhouse. I really like these cars but I wonder if they belong on the layout. They are 40 footers but have a much lower profile than the boxcars one would typically see in the 1950s which is my era....
I don't think that Roundhouse made any low-profile 40' boxcars. And while Varney did have a low, single-sheathed boxcar, I'd guess that yours are more likely from Train Miniature. They offered single sheathed, double sheathed, and several variations of steel sheathed cars, and all are among my favourites...
NYBW-John...In addition, the brake wheels are on vertical posts and rise above the roofline. As best I can read the service date on these, it appears they are all from the 1920s. How feasible is it that they would still be in service on a Class 1 railroad in 1956 which is the year my railroad is set in.
Cars from the '20s certainly could still have been in service in the mid-'50s, and brake wheels mounted on vertical staffs weren't, to the best of my knowledge, ever outlawed. I'd say that there's no need to use modellers' license if you want those cars on your layout, as they'd be entirely appropriate.
Wayne
Single and double sheathed boxcars were still available during the 50s. During that participator time they were being phased out. A few lasted into the 60s and 70s.
Amtrak America, 1971-Present.
If one studies the available 1950's photos, as I have, it becomes readily apparent that the vertical staff brakewheels were gone prior to the 1950's. Though earlier cars remained, they had been rebuilt with brakewheels mounted on a platform on the end of the car. This is why some manufacturers offer both early and late versions of some boxcars. Also, equipment used during WWII was largely worn out, and there were severe rusting issues with the steel(s) and paint finishes used at that time, so by the 1950's, many of the earlier cars, also wood sided box cars had either been rebuilt with steel sides or were fading from use. That doesn't mean they weren't still around in MOW service--it just means they were on the way out, ie less common than they had been. Certain underframes had proven by the 1950's to be terrible, and those cars--even steel underframe cars--were either being rebuilt or scrapped.
The service life of boxcars and all freight cars (today) is generally 40 years. Tank cars get an extra 10 years, I believe, if they meet certain requirements. I'm not sure how "rebuilding" affects the service life.
The 1970's IPD (Incentive per diem) "Railbox" and similar boxcars are either reaching "outlaw" status or down to the last couple years of life. Most of the ones out there now are the late models built from 1978 to 1980. The earlier ones (including the original Railbox orders beginning in 1973) are largely gone from revenue service.
PRR8259 If one studies the available 1950's photos, as I have, it becomes readily apparent that the vertical staff brakewheels were gone prior to the 1950's.
If one studies the available 1950's photos, as I have, it becomes readily apparent that the vertical staff brakewheels were gone prior to the 1950's.
And yet this 1950's film shows quite a number of such vertical staff brakewheels:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dhQq3oxpgQ
A bit of searching over on the STMFC Yahoo group reveals this quote:
"Re: Tichy's USRA SS Rebuilt P&LE-PMcKY 40 foot box"
"These cars were built with vertical staff hand brake wheels and all of the photos I have, including 1950's and later photos show vertical staff hand brake wheels."
In addition, the book "Steam Era Freight Cars Reference Manual, Volume One" shows a number of photos taken in the '50's of boxcars with vertical staff brakes.
Perhaps further study is in order.
Just a follow up to some of the comments made.
I checked the frames and they are steel so based on what has been said, that gives me license to continue to use them on my pike.
When I first took these out of storage I believed they were 36' boxcars but when I put them next to my 40' transition era boxcars, they were virtually the same length. The latter seems to be about 1/16 of an inch longer. I do have a couple wood sheethed 36' boxcars and they are noticably shorter.
Two of these cars have lost their vertical brake wheels. It would seem I have the option of fabricating new ones or converting them to a more modern mounting. It would seem that either could be prototypical.
Thanks to all for the info.
PS. I used the word pike instead of layout after reading Neil Besougloff's latest column in which he noted that pike used to be a commonly used term that seems to have fallen out of favor. When I got back into the hobby in the late 1970s a number of the how-to books I bought which were first written a decade or two earlier used the term pike and I always liked that term. I might do my part to resurect it.
Single sheathed boxcars (in modeler-speak: "outside braced" but that phrase is becoming more rare) were reasonably common into the 1960s. There is an ad in a 1965 Railway Age showing the complete rebuilding of a Green Bay & Western single sheathed 40' boxcar that said the car was good for decades more service. And circa 1968 I saw single sheathed boxcars at a local tannery - admittedly, a car in hide service was a car on its very last legs. There was no lower rung of service. At least one of those cars, and I remember this very clearly, had a 1919 built-date.
I remember seeing single sheathed boxcars in passing freight trains of the mid-1960s, but no recollection at all of a double sheathed boxcar. Reefers yes, boxcars nyet.
The other thing I can recall from watching 1960s freight trains was that there was still a considerable difference in height for boxcars because you were seeing such a wide variety of ages/eras of the car.
Dave Nelson
Vertical brake staffs were rare by the 1960's, but they were still around. Lots of very old equipment was still being used in maintenance service. A few 36 foot boxcars were still in revenue service in the 1950's, but they were getting pretty rare, too. A PRR X29 boxcar had an interior height of 8'7" and a height of 13'3" over the running board. By 1960, many of those X29's (as well as copies on B&O and other roads) were still in service, but you probably wouldn't find many cars with a lower profile. I believe a very few double sheath boxcars lasted into the 1960's, but they were very rare. I agree that a somewhat larger number of single sheath boxcars were still in service in the 1960's. AC&Y still operated SS Mathers in the early 1970's. Truss rods were obsolete by then. If you saw a revenue car with truss rods in the 1960's, that car also had a steel underframe.
Tom
The 40' long / 10.5' high boxcar didn't go into mass production until the late 1930's. 40' cars built to the earlier standard 8.5'-9' height from the 1910's-20's lasted well into the 1950's or even 1960's. However, they would have had to have been converted from K brakes to AB brakes by 1952 (IIRC) to be allowed in interchange service.
It sounds like the cars you have are either Train Miniature, or Walthers (who bought TM in the 1980's and expanded the line of boxcars - some of which are still available I believe.) All of the cars had steel underframes, so don't need to worry about trussrods, which were outlawed before WW2.
One thing to check are the trucks. Some of the models came with Arch-bar trucks, which were outlawed by about 1940 for interchange service. T-section Bettendorfs were common replacements (although they were outlawed at some point I believe?) as were Andrews trucks. More modern Bettendorfs may have been used by the 1950's.
One thing I have not seen mentioned is the distintion between "home road" and interchange service. Many cars banned from interchange continued to roll up miles on their owning railroads. Usually these were larger railroads that covered enough territory to make it feasible to load a car and haul it far enough to be profitable. Examples that come to mind are GN and NP who ran some WW2 era wood sheathed cars into the 1960s and 1970s in lumber and hide service. Many cars no longer acceptable for interchange ran out their final years on home rails in hide service. Don't forget Southern Pacific's legendary sugar beet gons with wood sides and extensions the ran between the beet fields and sugar refineries in California, never leaving SP rails. I also have a photo of a PRR X-29 boxcar with a vertical brakestaff, taken on the New Haven in 1962. There is also a photo of a Chesapeake and Ohio boxcar about the same height as the X-29, with a vertical brakestaff taken on the C&O in 1970, being loaded with bagged fertilizer. If you like your older type cars, run them as cars restricted to service on home rails only. This may even add to operation on a model railroad by having cars restricted to home road service only.
NHTX...I also have a photo of a PRR X-29 boxcar with a vertical brakestaff, taken on the New Haven in 1962. There is also a photo of a Chesapeake and Ohio boxcar about the same height as the X-29, with a vertical brakestaff taken on the C&O in 1970, being loaded with bagged fertilizer. If you like your older type cars, run them as cars restricted to service on home rails only. This may even add to operation on a model railroad by having cars restricted to home road service only.
Both of those cars could have been under the 40 year limit on freight car life, and the X-29 certainly wasn't on home rails. Vertical brake staffs weren't ever outlawed, and if those cars had been upgraded to AB brakes, they would have been in compliance with the regulations of the day.
This former PRR X-29 shows a BLT date of July, 1934...
...but its flat, rivetted ends are indicative of cars built between 1924 and 1930...
...while X-29s built after that had Dreadnaught ends.I was puzzled by this discrepancy, and asked the road's GM about the built date, which he verified, and also gave me some additional information. A couple of years later, he announced his retirement, and as a gift, I gave him a model of that car, as it was in at least some of its days on the Pennsy...
After some on-site research, I learned that the car's original number was stencilled on the inside of the doors: 54491, originally built sometime between November of 1929 and January 1930. However, there was a second number stencilled on the inside of the doors, too...6866. My friend, the GM, explained that the car had been taken out of service in 1934 and had been rebuilt as an express car. It was still equipped with high speed trucks, with locking centre pins, and steam and signal lines (although the hoses were missing from the car's ends). It also has AB-1B brake equipment with a quick service valve, suitable for passenger service. As you can see in the photos of the real car, it also had additional sill steps and grabirons, too.
A year or so later, on another visit, I crawled under the car, seeking confirmation that the car was actually re-built in the accepted definition of the word as far as the AAR and other regulatory bodies were concerned. Sure enough, the original single underfloor wooden stringers on each side of the main underframe had each been replaced with two steel ones.That fact alone made the car a true re-build, which permitted using a revised BLT date. That car, other issues notwithstanding, could have remained in interchange until July of 1974.At some point, it was downgraded to MoW service, and arrived at its present location in the yellow paint of that service.
The car is/was used as HEP for tourist excursions.
The woodsided cars built during WW2 steel shortages were just the era's typical 40' long / 10' 6" high steel boxcar, with steel roofs, ends, and underframes, but with wood sides. Nothing in the car violated regulations; the trucks, brakes, etc. all met the rules.
Cars after about 1938-40 that had wood floors and truss rods were banned from interchange traffic if they didn't have a steel underframe - but those were cars built in the 1900-1920 period. By the 1920's, most new cars had steel underframes.
So, woodsided 40' boxcars or reefers with steel roofs, ends and underframes (like the HO ones from Athearn) could easily continue for many years in interchange service. However, many railroads chose after the war to rebuild the boxcars with steel sides.
What is the lifespan for today's boxcars?
Older cars could be placed in with the MOW cars or stored on a siding, trees growing up through the tracks and between the cars make it look like they have been there awhile.
Good luck,
Richard
ATSFGuy What is the lifespan for today's boxcars?
Don't know yet. They haven't died.
50 years
49 CFR 215.203
Appendix A to 215 provides list of components that are not allowed in interchange service.