What is the lettering on this weight stencil? Is it LTWT V7 49? I've included both sides.

The car was weighed at station "V" in July of 1949. It weighed 42,260 pounds on that date. Cars are weighed periodically, in order to accurately bill customers, whose shipments are often billed by weight.

"V" would be the telegraph call for the station or town with the scale. Since no railroad is listed, it was probably "V" on the car's home railroad.

JR

Thank you! That would have been about the time it was retired. Are the initials LTWT?

LTWT (LighT WeighT). This is what a light or empty car weighs. Reporting marks (road name and car number) are elsewhere.
You can learn about all kinds of stuff by looking at the rules governing cars of various types. See Rule 30 page 59 for stencils.
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Co ... Rules+(MCB)+Governing+the+Condition+Of,+and&printsec=frontcover

Here's a little story about weighing freight cars...a look into a little known part of railroading. That "LtWt" number used to be critical information at certain times.

Back in the late 1970's, I worked for the MKT railroad as a switchman.

One of the regular occurrences was the calling of an extra yard engine to weigh freight cars. 3 switchmen and an engineer. Most of it was weighing loaded cars that had come from industry and pulled into the yard. Once in a while, there would be some empty cars run over the scale. Most times, we'd have 20 or 30 cars to weigh. It would take about an hour, it seems like. Nobody was in a rush... we were out of sight of the yardmaster, so he wasn't hounding us. No radios back then... all hand signals.

The engineer would slowly shove the string of "weighers" up an incline, with a "weigh in motion" scale just past the peak of the hump, the switch foreman at the top of the hill giving engineer hand signals, the pinpuller would lift the pin as the car reached the breakover point and it would slowly roll over the scale... a yard clerk would occupy the scale house, weighing each end (truck) of each car as it rolled over his scale. That was the interesting part, watching the clerk weigh the cars.
It was a manually operated scale. The live part of the scale was only about 20 foot long... just long enough to fit one truck on comfortably. The entire car wouldn't fit on the scale... just the trucks.
The clerk had a track list with (hopefully) all the car numbers (in order... again, hopefully) we were bringing to be weighed. I think he probably had written each car number on a separate scale ticket prior to us getting to the scale.

He needed about 4 hands. He'd look out the window, check the car number,... place the ticket in the scale mechanism....as soon as the first truck was fully on the scale, he'd reach up and squeeze a lever on the scale beam, which would impress weight numbers on one line of the ticket, then he'd pull the ticket out, flip it end for end and reinsert it into the scale beam... wait for the next truck to roll onto the scale.. squeeze the lever... yank the ticket and insert the scale ticket for the next car.
He needed 4 hands because as the car was rolling past his window, he'd take note of the cars "light (empty) weight.
After the car was off the scale, and before the next car got on it... he had to write the cars "LtWt" on the line provided...add up the weight on both ends of the car that were just weighed...subtract the LtWt from that total to figure the tare weight. write all those figures down.. all the while the next car was coming at him...
The just weighed car rolled down the incline into an empty track.... the "fieldman" would ride the first one down the hill...and as it rolled to a stop a ways down there.. he'd tie a handbrake on it to keep it there.. .and wait for the next car to come down and be sure it coupled into the standing car... mainly just keep them all together and keep them from rolling off. When we were done weighing, we'd take the cars to a different track and place them there so one of the regular switch engines could classify them for their final destinations.

Just a guess at to why we had to reweigh empty cars, though. A lot of what we weighed were loads of cement from a plant in a nearby city...and most of the reweighs were empty cement hoppers... little 39 foot two bay hoppers... Katy cars.
As a customer unloaded a car of powdered cement.. they didn't always do a thorough job and get all the cement out. I'm sure moisture would cause the cement to solidify on the inside of the car, and that would cause the empty weight of the car to increase from what was stenciled on the car...and the shipper and customer would be paying more than he ought to.
I guess you see what I'm saying?
When we finish weighing the loaded car, the arithmetic determines that there is 100 tons of cement in that car. Car is unloaded at the end customer, but only 95 tons of cement comes out because 5 tons of solidified powder remains on the inside surface of the car...

The ready mix plant that got the load really can't tell how much he rec'd... they don't weigh the inbound load.. they take it for granted that they got 100 tons of cement powder.
The cement plant gets the empty back... they don't weigh the inbound empty... the man just stands up on top of the car as it's being loaded.. he looks down in the car and tells the man at the controls when to stop sending product down the chute, so he can move the spout over to the next hole in the hopper top to start filling the next compartment.

If the car is shown to weigh 20 tons empty.. when we weigh their load and it shows 100 tons tare weight... but the car actually weighed 25 tons empty..there is only 95 tons of cement in the car. The manufacturer is paying us for shipping 100 tons, when in reality there was only 95 tons in the car.

Over in one disused part of the yard were some tracks where we'd spot certain empty company freight cars.. often cement empties... and a contractor was employed as a "car cleaner"...
He'd clean out empty company boxcars for the railroad so the shipper who got the car next wouldn't be force to clean dunnage out of the cars before they could load their product.

He'd also attempt to clean out the cement cars...beating on the sides and hopper bottoms with a sledgehammer... to dislodge the powder and get it to fall out the bottom of the car onto some strategically placed cardboard sheet or plywood..
Local railroad employees were free to avail themselves of this powdered cement. I've poured a lot of concrete made with free portland cement!

Anyway, that's the reason I think we had to reweigh empties every now and then... customer concern.

This is a caboose. Interesting that its last weight in ‘49 was 42260. When we moved it 3 years ago it roughly weighed 38000 by the readings on the crane. I know in ‘38 it still had arch bar trucks, which have been replaced. When it was moved it didn’t have brakes, cupola seats, stove, water tank and a lot of other accessories. I suppose all that made up the missing 4226 lbs.

I've been told that "weight loss" is a common problem, due to rust and brake shoe wear. I believe this loss from various causes, was the single biggest issue with the accurate Light Weight of a freight car. (Although that much lost on a caboose seems excessive).

JR

"Tare" is the Light Weight of the car, "Net" is the weight of the contents.
As for the loss of weight from the caboose, the post mentions that it had lost a stove, brakes, water tank, and other parts between weightings.

Yes, I saw that post. But 4000 pounds lost?

JR

When you are dealing with railroad equipment 2 tons is a drop in the bucket.

Looking at the painted light weight - it is even lighter in the picture that it was when the paint was initially placed on the cars - faded paint is thinner than freshly applied paint.