Hi all,

Canadian National (and perhaps some other railroads) converted many of their older plain bearing passenger cars to roller bearings using a special bearing box that was designed to fit into the original openings on pedestal trucks. I believe it was a 9-inch pedestal opening, and the box was designed to fit a standard 5½x10 roller bearing, essentially the standard size for most freight equipment. This allowed CN to use a standard freight car wheelset in most of its tread-brake passenger equipment, with obvious benefits.

Besides the occasional CN car that's being scrapped or parted out, has anyone found a source for these boxes? Besides my own current project (debating whether or not to convert an Erie baggage car), it occurred to me that there are probably a lot of other tourist and museum operations that could benefit from a source for these boxes if they wanted to convert older equipment to a more standard, easily maintainable, and readily available wheelset.

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!

The conversion adaptors from plain journals to roller bearings were made by Timken. I have purchased them in the last 20 years. Putting 10” rollers in 9” plain journal trucks would be difficult. The axles are different lengths. I have done this, but it required custom made axles. 9” AP roller bearings were available, but they came from England. They were made by Timken, expensive, and slow to get.

My understanding--and it basically amounts to a rumor--is that roller conversions in a former journal box will not be accepted for interchange by the major Class Ones. Supposedly such a conversion interferes with inspection and/or lineside hot box detectors.

That may be completely irrelevant in your case, or may not even be true in the first place.......

Those older journal box adaptors using the original cast-in journal boxes were outlawed in interchange in the early '90s, I think. Pretty sure those kits are not available in 2025.

You should be able to convert to rollers if the journal rides in pedestals and is not an integral part of a truck casting. The adaptor replaces the journal box. Seems to me most passenger cars had separate journals.

Unless things have changed and I haven't noticed.....

NS won't accept them for interchange, they say that their hotbox detectors can't read them: viewtopic.php?p=287085&sid=a74d48fda083841efb8fb8f4d9784b05#p287085
Edit: fixed terrible grammar error.

I might have not been clear.... You'd replace the plain journal box that rides between the pedestal jaws with a bearing adaptor pretty much like a standard exposed end cap roller bearing setup. Bolt the pedestal stops back on and you're good to go. Perfectly good for interchange. Of course I'm assuming your pedestal dimensions are standard.

It's not a cheap conversion - wheel sets are expensive.

We converted the tender trucks on ARR 557 to rollers much earlier in our overhaul. I wasn't directly involved, but my recollection is the we had instructions, possibly published by the AAR. The work involved removing some material to give clearance for the adapter and cutting a hole in the bottom of the journal box for drainage.

We were very fortunate that a set of NOS adapters were found in an Alaska Railroad warehouse and donated for the project. We had to replace axles so we could fit new wheels that were a common, stock size. (My recollection is that wheels with the smaller axles that were originally fitted were no longer a normally produced size and were much more expensive and harder to get than stock sizes.) Axles were also NOS for WW-II hospital cars, also found in a warehouse, and also donated. They were machined to fit the new wheels wheels purchased and installed under contract by the ARR shop.

Yes, I'm talking about completely replacing the bearing box in such a way that would permit the car to be moved in interchange service.

Here's an example of a former CN heavyweight Pullman car that has had this conversion done.