I found this photo while surfing through some online photos of the Philadelphia and Reading Iron and Coal. I had no idea coal was loaded into boxcars in such a manner. This got me thinking about all of the uses of boxcars that most people might not know about.

http://digital.hagley.org/cdm4/item_vie ... X=1&REC=15

I think it would be a great idea for a museum to do an exhibit on the many uses of the simple boxcar.

I agree. Often when I am looking on Ebay I will see old photos of men loading various commodities into boxcars. It seems like they could and did use boxcars to haul about anything.

I have heard of them loading ore in burlap sacks into boxcars. It sure kept a lot of men busy, that is for certain.

T7

Not sure if it still exists, but I think it was Western Ry. Museum that had a boxcar labeled "Hide Loading Only". I think this would be the last assignment before sending the car off to the "boneyard". And I recall reading about "grain doors" that would be placed on the inside of the doorways. These would extend almost to the top of a doorway and allow the car to be loaded with loose grain (not in sacks) back in the days before covered hopper cars.

"And I recall reading about "grain doors" that would be placed on the inside of the doorways. These would extend almost to the top of a doorway and allow the car to be loaded with loose grain (not in sacks) back in the days before covered hopper cars."--Bob Davis

That's correct. And in later years, the grain would be blown in through some sort of pipe device; there is a very brief scene (it really is almost short enough that if you blink at the wrong time you'll miss it) in the movie, "Picnic."

Equally interesting, devices similar if not identical to that pictured were used to unload bulk grain from boxcars, which otherwise had to be shoveled out.

Bob Davis also commented about cars used for animal hides. He's right about that, too; these would be the raw skins from animals, mostly cattle, that were being sent from the slaughterhouse to the tannery. Essentially you're talking about skins and the remnants of the flesh in such a load; you can imagine the horrible smell from what was essentially a sizable quantity of rotting meat on a hot day. Such a car was essentially ruined for other service after being loaded with hides, so hide cars were very often on their last legs.

Hi Tom,

I have been slowly researching this topic. I got interested in it 20 years ago when I saw the boxcar loader at the abandoned Reading anthracite "old" St. Nicholas colliery. I have been able to get official permission to photograph it (yes, to dial up a previous thread, it was exploration that was not trespassing and did result in some artsy fartsy morning-light pictures... And amazingly I did not spray paint anything or steal anything, but I digress...)

The St. Nick complex has two different kinds of car dumpers (for mine run coal), the boxcar loader and the more typical hopper loaders. Somehow I hope this site is preserved.

The boxcar loader there follows the Ottumwa Box Car Loader Co. design which has the boxcar sit in a rocking cradle. The doorways are blocked to a certain height with boards, then the loading chute is inserted in the remaining open part of the door. As the coal comes down the chute, the box car is rocked end to end to even out the coal. The rocking motion is like a swing, with the ends of the box car going up in the air.

There were other loaders, including one by F-M that did not rock the car. In the Pennsylvania anthracite regions, the Ottumwa style was the most common. Take a close look at anthracite colliery photos showing the rail sidings, and you'll start to notice thenpresence of boxcars near those with a loader.

Boxcars and low-side gondolas remains in anthracite service right into the 1960's. Not every consignee needed a full hopper load, nor did they have a way to dump a hopper. Matching the right kind of car to the right consignee was part of the day to day work of the railroad.

To that end, I don't know if railroads would send boxcars off into interchange without a consignee assigned as would they with a hopper load (by doing this, the railroad would work with the coal company to sell the load after it was in transit).

I have spoken with gents whose early jobs on the railroad or in industry involved shoveling coal out of boxcars. You can imagine what that was like. The same sources tell of boxcars loaded with coal boards across the width of the car to create pockets where different grades of coal could be shipped in the same boxcar. I could see the F-M loader filling cars with partitions, but it must have been difficult with an Ottumwa.

Boxcar coal loading was also used out west, but I have been limiting my research to the anthracite applications.

A lot of data has come up on Google books search as of late, and some resources in Iowa have shared info about the Ottumwa operation with me. At some point, I will publish/share the info once I feel lime I have a more complete story.

All the best,


Rob

I was once asked "What do they carry in box cars? Boxes?"
My response was that they were used to carry anything that needed to be protected from the elements. Small to large boxes of manufactured goods, lumber, grain, and the like.

Box cars had end doors for the loading of long items -- often finished lumber that was too long to go in through the center doors.

Box cars also carried precious and semi-precious ore for further processing. This might be sacked or just loose. I have read an accident report of a 1915 incident on the Southern Pacific narrow gauge operation and it described that the train had picked up box cars with reprocessed mill tailings at the stop prior to the derailment involving one of the cars. The wooden cars had the ore piled up over each truck bolster.

My understanding of the use of the high, small end doors in lumber loading is that the long piece of wood would come in through the side door A end first. The A end would be stuck out the end door so that the B end could clear the center door. This would allow a car to carry any piece of wood that wasn't longer than the interior length of the car. (By A and B end I am referring to the ends of the piece of wood.)

If I'm not mistaken one of the Old Company's Lehigh publicity post cards shows an L&NE boxcar being loaded with coal in a similar way.

-Alex

Somewhere in my "stuff" I have an old catalog for Link-Belt that shows an amazing array of car loaders...seemingly for about anything under the sun.

T7

Bob, you have quite a memory. The only "Hide service" car that I rcall at the Western Railway Museum was the car that the ovehead line material from Yuba City/ Marysville was loaded in by the Sacramento Northern. The Museum kept the car for almost a year while unloading it. That was in 1965!

Anything that will fix through the door has been hauled in a box car.

I was once reading a manual for a older Bobcat Skidsteer Loader and there
was a section for the electric boxcar unloader version with a electric cordreel
on the back.

The only thing that is worse that a Hide car is a slaughterhouse tankage gon.

-Hudson

"I have an old catalog for Link-Belt that shows an amazing array of car loaders...seemingly for about anything under the sun."

This catalog sounds like physical evidence of the attitude that John Kneiling was writing about in his Trains Magazine columns of the 1970's. In a memorable line, he summed up traditional railroad attitude toward specialized cars: "We have the box car and you can adapt to it." Of course, the adaptation came at a cost, and the result was the growth of truck freight at the expense of carload railroading. The death of the box car is pretty much the story of the birth of modern railroading, in the form of the grain hopper, other specialized hoppers, auto racks, plywood flats, coil cars, and so on.

I wish my museum was rich enough to tell this story by packing one of our auto box cars with four `36 Buicks, two with their noses elevated, so that we could show visitors that the old ways weren't always efficient, and the auto rack was invented for a reason.

I have a memory of a trip to a rate-bureau hearing in the 1970's when I passed a door (in the old ATSF/Railway Exchange Building?) labeled, "Grain Door Bureau."
Presumably for managing the continent's supply of grain doors. Now I wonder if a grain door even exists, although it wouldn't surprise me if the Canadians have one somewhere.

Aarne Frobom
Silage Township, Michigan

Aarne -

In one of our display cars, we have a photo of Studebaker loading Studebaker Larks into an automobile boxcar with the nose of one of the cars elevated in the picture. Studebaker could ship only 3 autos that way (one on each end and one in the middle) in a 40' car. Yes, it would be nice to show the actual automobiles (I wonder how many Larks even exist these days?) in our old Wabash single sheathed automobile boxcar, but the photo will have to do.

Les

When you're talking about odd ways to load automobiles, don't forget a fairly recent example of "thinking outside the box(car)."

I refer to those enclosed carriers that transported Chevy Vegas vertically, two rows of them on each side of a central spine.

I photographed one of those cars sometime in the late 1970s at PC Conway Yard. I'll bet that's all that exists of any of them today.

Questions: Were the autos arranged nose down, or nose up? How did they deal with keeping the engine oil from leaking? How about the battery acid?

They were called the "Vert-A-Pak":
http://www.exactrail.com/ho-vert-a-pac
http://forum.atlasrr.com/forum/topic.as ... C_ID=51594