Cement car rebuilds.

[e-paw]

My mid 40's freelanced line handles two main commodities. The backbone of the company is hard coal, followed in a close second by cement. After the attack on Pearl Harbor the U.S. railroads were asked to move more freight and people than at any point in history in order to defeat the Axis powers. When Uncle Sam needed cement shipments to increase 10 fold, the railroads did what they had to to keep supplies moving. For rail lines coming out of the great depression this was no easy task. The SH&D car shops answered the call by pulling older equipment from the dead line in Bergen point and rebuilding them. This meant using cars that were not ideally suited for the job due to the labor intensive loading/unloading design of the cars, but in time of crises they got the job done.
To represent this I modified a group of old Athearn pickle cars and an ice refer. As I was applying the decals I thought that the cars needed a little something more to back date them a little. Adding fish belly center sills would do the trick so out came the styrene and I went to work.

    Here is a shot of the cars to be modified, I figure the pickle cars could have started life as covered gondolas and the reefer could have the ice bunkers removed and dams added to the inside of the doorways to allow for the loading of bulk cement not unlike the l&NE did to some of It's box cars. All of the cars will get hopper doors added to the under frames also, but for now I working on the center sills.



    The were cut from simple styrene, lucky all the under frames are the same so I only had to measure once and cut seven sets.




    they were glued in place after I cut some groves in the brake gear so that they would lay flat. I was not to worried about detail on the sills because the hopper doors will cover parts of them.

[e-paw]

    When that was dry I added a cap to the sill with some more Styrene.




    with them all installed I set them on the track to see how they look. I say so far, so good. I'll start on the hopper doors tomorrow.

[Gary S]

Definitely so far so good. The mods look good and the paint scheme looks good too.

[Ralph]

Those are some very cool cars! I wasn't familiar with the style of cement car from that era.
Ralph

[e-paw]

Thanks Gary. the colors are Polly scale aged concrete and empire green. I've used them before on some of the company structures but never on rolling stock. My wife calls it the Eddie Bauer scheme .

Ralph for the most part covered hoppers like this L&NE one were the most common at that time for hauling cement.

The PRR preferred It's own version for the job

But others modified existing older cars like this USRA single sheathed D&H box car.

[Mr Fixit]

The wood sheathed box car would probably have had some sort of internal bulkheads/slope sheets to prevent the car from being overloaded as well as to facilitate unloading via the bottom chutes.

The thing to remember with cement is that it is very heavy volume wise and must never get damp or wet as this totally ruins the cement.

I am surprised that cement was being handled in bulk form like that at the start of WW11, because I was reading somewhere about the building of the Interstate Highway system in the 50's and even when pouring concrete roads, bagged cement was used, with stacks of bags positioned regularly in front of the levelling machine.

I think that the Hoover Dam was also poured using bagged cement, mixed at the top of the dam site and delivered via flying fox type cranes, cant think of the correct name at the moment.
Mark

[MasonJar]

Cool pickle cars. Interesting to think that there was once such demand for pickles that they had a whole rail-served industry with specialized cars to boot...!

Boxcars carried a lot of bulk goods before the widespread use of specialized cars (although the boxcars themselves were often specialized to a degree). Other bulk good in boxcars that did not react well to moisture included wheat and salt.

I agree that cement is very heavy and bulkheads/slope sheets may have been used to limit loading and/or make unloading easier. However, the "guy with shovel" was also a lot more common in days gone by, and the railroad or industry would have always had a few handy to assist with the unloading. It seems unthinkable today with all the mechanization, but I have seen videos (linked here at Big Blue... I'll find them later) of guys with shovels helping to empty ships of the last bit of grain...!


Andrew

[tetters]

Very neat. I would never have thought that such a car could exist until now.

[shortliner]

However, the "guy with shovel" was also a lot more common in days gone by, and the railroad or industry would have always had a few handy to assist with the unloading. It seems unthinkable today with all the mechanization, but I have seen videos (linked here at Big Blue... I'll find them later) of guys with shovels helping to empty ships of the last bit of grain...!


Andrew

And before the Rail Ferries in New York Harbour, Railcars were manually unloaded on one side onto barges, floated across, and then manually reloaded onto rail cars at the other side! The working man earned his corn in those days with hard, physical, labor for very little pay, and there were plenty of takers ready to do it!

[rrinker]

Up til the 40's a LOT of cement was shipped in 100 pound bags loaded into regualr boxcars.
I need lots of covered hoppers for my mid-50's era, unfortunately the ones I need weren;t offered by anyone as a kit that I am aware of, since the prototype was pretty much a 'kit' itself, the railroad adding roofs to 55 ton open hoppers. There's an old MR article that shows how to build them, but that's going to be a huge project to make about a dozen of them. I know nothing of molding and casting, maybe I should learn - build one roof assembly and cast the rest. Bowser had a kit of a slightly newer one, but I think they came with 1957 BLT dates on them, which is a year past my cutoff.

--Randy

[doctorwayne]

Randy, Detail Associates offer a set of 8 square hatches to replace the round ones on the old MDC/Roundhouse covered hoppers. You could construct a roof from sheet styrene, then add the hatches and a roof walk to your open hoppers. Someone used to make a one-piece conversion for open hoppers (McKean, I think, had one for more modern 100 ton open hoppers), but the name escapes me at the moment. Varney (and later Lifelike) offered their 50 ton open hopper with a snap-in roof, with hatches and roofwalk cast integrally. I had a bunch of them but they went to Mister Nutbar. He may be able to provide a photo.

I built four of these Dominion boxcars converted for flux service. The roof hatches are the Detail Associates ones, while the rest of the car is scratchbuilt.


Wayne

[MasonJar]

Nice looking boxcar Wayne! What does it say on the door?


Andrew

[rrinker]

Actually for most of the cars, the round hatches are what I want. I did have some ideas for experimenting, liek using the roof from a covered hopper kit and seeing if it fit on an open hopper, although even if it works it seems sort of silly to waste all the covered hopper kits just to get a roof. Foreign road ones are easy, I already have a set of WM, and a couple of B&O kits, and the LNE one pictured. Reading was like a cheap Dutchman (PA Dutch), they just had roof panels made and converted the open cars instead of having new cars built.

--Randy

[doctorwayne]

Thanks, Andrew. Here's a closer view:


When I had my third batch of custom lettering made, I included a few such things that I thought might be useful, even for non-homeroad cars. Others include "ICE SERVICE ONLY" and "HIDE LOADING ONLY", along with some older "BLT" dates. The latter is to compensate for the apparent rarity of "3"s in most commercially-available data sets, something I hadn't noticed until backdating the layout to the '30s. I can understand a lack of '30s BLT dates, but there's a dearth of "3"s in car weights and dimensions, too, making it difficult to "raid" these areas for the required digits. Champ's re-weigh data sheets eventually solved this problem - luckily I stocked-up before they quit.

Unfortunately, many of the 50 custom sheets have a very thin application of ink, resulting in many smaller letters and numerals losing their thinner components. Quite a few of the "RETURN TO GERN" notations are un-useable. The reporting marks, car numbers, and various-size heralds turned out well, though, and I was applying heralds to a few hoppers last night.

Wayne

[MasonJar]

Thanks for the close-up Wayne.


Andrew