I found this photo on a Google search and I am wondering if any cars of this type made it to preservation?

That is part of a series of AAR standard 10-foot inside height cars built in the late 1930s for the C&O with what were called, if my memory is right, Creco ends[Correction--Deco ends and Creco doors, thanks to Mr. Wilkins in the post below]. They would also have had a corrugated roof, something fairly common on C&O box cars of that time. A number of these cars survived into the 1960s, and were leased to the B&O, and lettered in that road's "circus" lettering with an oxide red color. Paint scheme as delivered and shown was mineral brown sides (like Santa Fe in the same era), with black ends, underframe, roof, and doors.

I think it was a relatively small lot, like 100 cars, and I don't believe any survived, but I don't have to tell you I wouldn't mind being wrong!

That's a 1937 AAR boxcar, of which the C&O had several. 100 of the order were built by General American with Deco Ends and Creco doors, while the rest of the order had Dreadnought ends and Youngstown doors.

The B&O had some as well. This is a really small subset of a larger order. I can't really find a reference to these ends in my 1940 Car Builders' Cyclopedia.

Viking roofs maybe? "Deco" ends is something modelers call them, as they have an "art deco" design. I wonder what the real name was. Perhaps one should consult an older Car Builders Cyclopedia.

Thanks for the info so far! If none survived, I must say that is truly a tragedy! I have never seen any other railroad box car with ends like these! It has a certain feel of finesse to it! The press to build these car ends must have taken a while to form!

It is an interesting design, but didn't catch on, obviously.

The 1937 AAR standard boxcar is a "big deal" in the evolution from wood to steel freight cars. Even if your museum had a "Plan jane" example restored, it would help tell an important part of the freight story.

Like modelers, we often get obsessed with "one offs" or oddball cars. Some of the most realistic model railroad layouts I have seen made a big point to "model the ordinary." In one case, it was literally a sea of boxcar brown, with a few oddballs sprinkled in, like B&O Wagontops, but not too many.

Preserve the ordinary.

David M. Wilkins
A Simmons-Boardman Publication, Missouri

Hi all
Very interesting boxcar , too bad that none of them made it into preservation .The boxcar is gone , The company still exists , under another name , please read below . Pat.
Encyclopedia ofChicago

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General American Transportation Corp.
In 1898, Max Epstein founded a Chicago-based railcar leasing firm called the Atlantic Seaboard Dispatch. One of the first companies to lease specialty cars to railroads, Epstein's operation started with only 28 used cars. In 1902, the name was changed to German-American Car Co. In 1907, when the company owned a fleet of 400 cars, it opened repair and maintenance shops in East Chicago, Indiana; it then began to manufacture new steel tank cars in addition to leasing used ones. By 1916, when the company began to sell stock to the public and changed its name to General American Tank Car Corp., it had a fleet of 2,300 cars and annual revenues of about $3 million. By the 1920s, General American had become a leading producer of tank cars, including specialty cars lined with glass or nickel for the transportation of milk, acids, and other liquids. By the early 1920s, the company's plants at East Chicago and Warren, Ohio, were turning out 10,000 new cars a year, worth about $20 million. In 1933, when it owned a fleet of nearly 50,000 cars, the company changed its name to the General American Transportation Corp. By the 1940s, when about 3,000 men worked at the East Chicago plant, General American was the nation's leading lessor of railcars. By the beginning of the 1960s, annual revenues approached $250 million. Soon after changing its name to GATX Corp. in 1975, the company began to exit the car-manufacturing business. But GATX Corp. added to its traditional operations by leasing aircraft and setting up a large financial services division. By the end of the 1990s, GATX, still headquartered in Chicago, owned a fleet of nearly 90,000 railcars, employed about 6,000 people around the country, and had annual revenues of about $1.7 billion.

This entry is part of the Encyclopedia's Dictionary of Leading Chicago Businesses (1820-2000) that was prepared by Mark R. Wilson, with additional contributions from Stephen R. Porter and Janice L. Reiff.






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The Encyclopedia of Chicago © 2004 The Newberry Library. All Rights Reserved. Portions are copyrighted by other institutions and individuals. Additional information on copyright and permissions.

Well, I went and dug out my copy of "Freight Car Equipment of the Chesapeake & Ohio Railway, August 1, 1937," which is an "enhanced" reprint of a book the C&O made available to its freight customers "to acquaint our patrons with the various types of freight car equipment owned by the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway Company," as stated by J. W. King, General Superintendent of Transportation. Thanks due to the C&O Historical Society for this publication.

The cars in question come from Plate 28, for series 4000-5499. 4000 to 4499 were built by General American in 1936, 4500-4999 were built by Pullman-Standard in 1936 and 1937, and 5000-5499 were built by General American in 1937. In September of 1979, six cars remained in revenue service on the C&O portion of what was then Chessie System: 4061, 4253, 4271, 5084, 5264, and 5340.

"Notes: All cars in this series had Dreadnaught ends, as shown in the diagram, with the exception of series 5400-5499. These cars were equipped with Deco ends, which had a diamond-and-dot embossment pattern unlikely to be confused with anything else. Cars in series 5250-5499 had Creco side doors, as opposed to Youngstown doors on series 4000-4999 and Camel doors (similar to Youngstown in appearance) on series 5000-5249. The photograph of C&O 5400, below, illustrates the Creco doors and Deco ends."

From "Appendix C, Corrections, Updates, and Additions to the 1980 Edition"

"Plate 28: (series 4000-5499) Cars in series 4000-4400 and 5000-5499 were built with Viking corrugated roofs (these corrugations are barely visible in the Plate 28 photograph).

"Two hundred four cars from this series were transferred to the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Company in 1964 (possibly through Railease, Inc.). They were relettered and renumbered to B&O series 169250-169376 and 169500-169576. Most of these cars were retired by 1978; one car survived until about the end of 1983.

"The remaining cars in C&O series 4000-5499 were retired by late 1984."

Brochures from a couple of model railroad equipment suppliers that illustrate some of the details not available in other photographs; the Sunshine Models are resin kits in HO scale, while the Rich Yoder cars are in brass in O scale:

http://www.sunshinekits.com/sunimages/sun18a.pdf

http://www.richyodermodels.com/rym_fc_co_boxcar5400.htm



True, true, true--but imagine having such a car in brown and black, in a string of Dreadnaught-end cars (or at one end of a string, with something like a flat or tank car next to it), and as it goes by your visiting model rail enthusiast says, "What was that?"

My 1970 edition of freight car equipment shows the numbers of the cars, but no actual class. There is no plate in the book, either, so my guess would be that they were all gone by then.

Andy Pullen

There's actually a surviving example of one of these boxcars that's now serving a different purpose for the C&O's successor at the yards in Russell, KY. This picture was taken July of 2012.

http://hostthenpost.com/uploads/90bcb86 ... a219c2.jpg

WOW! What a find! And it has much of the hardware, too, including a tack board and a wooden roofwalk!

It's even on rails! :-D

Let's hope someone is keeping an eye on it, and it doesn't get cut up.

The other two box cars visible are Pullman PS-1s. It may be noted that the C&O was the first road to purchase these, an order of 1,000 cars around 1948. They were the first to have the "C&O For Progress" herald, and the herald and some of the other lettering was done in reflective Scotchlite, to boot.

http://cohs.org/repository/Archives/coh ... s-4657.jpg

C&O was still using mineral brown paint with black ends in 1948:

http://cohs.org/repository/Archives/csp ... -cl2.1.jpg

Repainted 1937 car with Dreadnaught ends:

http://cohs.org/repository/Archives/coh ... s-7958.jpg

Now, out of curiosity, are there any box cars anywhere in preservation that still have the auto loading equipment that was used before auto racks?

http://cohs.org/repository/Archives/coh ... s-8016.jpg

http://cohs.org/repository/Archives/coh ... s-8017.jpg

General search page, again with great thanks to the C&OHS:

http://cohs.org/cgi-bin/cohs_search.pl? ... p=1&sl=100

"Cool story, bro."

What's in YOUR wallet?

[quote="J3a-614"]Now, out of curiosity, are there any box cars anywhere in preservation that still have the auto loading equipment that was used before auto racks?

http://hostthenpost.com/uploads/1da6629 ... 5d59cb.jpg

Is this one of them? This is also in Russell still used by CSX.

"Automobile" box cars can be a misnomer. As I understand it, it was the "standard" designation for any boxcar that had more than one door per side, including door and a half boxcars found on some roads.

If you check out older Car Builders' Cyclopedias you see the "automobile" equipment that was in most of these cars, usually pockets on the side walls to erect some sort of support, sometimes timber.

I believe Greenfield Village has an early Automobile car, complete with the metal "Pockets" in the wood sides of the car for such supports. It was discussed in an earlier thread.

Les Beckman at HVRM seems to be the resident freight car expert and may or may not have more to chime in.

As for the car in Russell, I wonder if the sides are still on it.

David

This is one of the things I really like about this forum. You never know what kind of rare gems someone is likely to find still existing.

Agreed. There may not be a PRR 0-6-0 in a quarry, or a NYC Hudson in a barn, but smaller "gems" still exist.