Page 14 - January February 2000

Carrying that Grain... More on Grain Shipment David Foster
Boxcars are how grain is transported when there aren’t enough covered hoppers or covered hoppers haven’t been sufficiently developed.
In the last few years there has been an article entitled “40’ At A Time” in one of the news journals with lots of pictures of BN 40’ boxcars brought out of retirement to help shift the grain harvest years after 40’ cars were supposed to have disappeared. It doesn’t say but I imagine that the cars stick to BN rails as their “disappearance” was officially from interchange traffic.
How do you stop the grain falling out as fast as you put it in the door?
Somewhere in my collection of photocopies I have bits of evidence going back to the last century that show three things.
Specific “Grain Doors” were designed to be inserted across the opening of the ordinary door inside the car. These were large (although not the full height of the door) and must have been heavy but they were not hinged and not usually part of the car. I imagine that they were kept at centralized stores out of season.“Grain Boards” were similarly designed to be inserted across the door but as their name suggests were individual boards rather than a whole door. Their advantage was that they could be added as the load filled up and removed as the load was shovelled out. Bear in mind that while mechanization occurred much earlier in the States a lot of work has always been done with hand shovels. I imagine that Grain Doors would have been used where cars were filled from elevators and either vacuumed out or tipped (see later). Grain Boards were probably used where loading or unloading would occur at a team track or anywhere else that a slower, more controlled unloading would be wanted or inevitable.
The poor cousin of proper fittings was the humble plank nailed into place.
I don’t know when (or if) they have stopped being fitted but throughout most of my collection of boxcar drawings boxcar doors are shown as being edged with a “Nailing Strip” either side on the inside of the car. As far as I recall these continue to appear post 1945.
Certainly cars in the 50’s were still being provided with “Nailable Flooring”. The odd thing is that “Nailable” Flooring was steel flooring.
Wood having continued in regular use for wagon floors in this country even into the present we do not anticipate the issues raised by the early adoption of all steel construction. The really weird thing
is that the old practices of securing loads with nailed down blocks of timber lasted as long as it did and that load restraining systems are relatively new.
Although these three ways of stopping the grain getting out were employed they were not entirely successful. Plain nailed boards were probably the most prone to leaks and/or splitting under the load while on the move. The boxcars themselves, even steel ones could leak where they were well worn or damaged. I’m sure that I’ve seen comment somewhere on the amount of grain lost in transit just because of ill fitting doors and other holes. Obviously a car with a hole so bad that grain poured out would have been taken out of service but this might only have been temporarily while a patch was nailed in place. A slight trickle and grains just working their way between boards wouldn’t show up unless a car stood in one place for some time and most grains would escape with the flexing of the car on the move. All that would show would be the loss of a few pounds weight between loading and unloading.
Not very much lost weight; until you multiply it by thousands of car loads.
I believe that efforts were made to “caulk” the more obvious gaps with rag. Some of this material probably got unloaded with the grain. Equally grain that worked between boards, particularly on double skinned cars, must have been an unmitigated nuisance as it would rot and contaminate the car and later loads. In this county bargees went to great lengths to sweep out their boats after a grain load not just to glean the wheat, barley or whatever but to avoid the stench of rotting grain and fungal damage to their boats.
Many drawings of wooden bodied cars show a small door at floor level in the car ends above the coupler.
These doors, about two feet square, were “Grain Doors” of a different kind. They enabled the car to be end discharged in the same way that modern trucks sometimes have small grain doors in the tailgate. I would imagine that once the door was open more than half of the load would flow out without the assistance of shovels or brooms but cars were also tipped in the same way that we end tipped coal. Obviously it would only be the large facilities like docks and really big mills that warranted and could afford the hydraulic rams to end tip 40’ 70ton plus boxcars. At other places the end of the car would be located over a pit between the rails just as hopper cars are unloaded. Failing that, for example on a
team track, I would guess that a bin might be made at the end of a car with ties and a tarpaulin. It is surprising how much ingenuity can come into play when there is a lot of shoveling to be done.
Some cars have an additional door or and alternative door in the centre of the end just below the roof.
This was a lumber door for loading and unloading long boards. In cattle cars such a high end door was for feed. Having just gone back through some of my copies I notice that these doors don’t seem to appear in any cars with pressed steel ends. This is logical as one of the major considerations of pressed steel ends was their uniformity and their integral strength. I have seen end doors in steel cars but these have been whole end doors for vehicle loading.
Another consideration might be that by the time of these ends vacuum unloading may have been more developed.
I have seen pictures of equipment for side tipping boxcars to unload grain through the normal side door and over the internal grain door.
Bear in mind that grain is rather like water and that the pressure of a full load on the inside grain doors would make their extraction without taking the load off of them by shoveling not just difficult but dangerous. Failed, that is broken, Grain Doors or Boards amounted to a shifted load and could certainly jam the car’s own door shut or, again, make opening it very dangerous. At the height of the season there must have always been pressure to get cars turned round quickly but safely. Knowing the rail industry there probably were fatalities and at least permanent injuries many if not most years. In these days of safety helmets and high visibility jackets with remote control and powerful machines we tend to forget that an essential skill of railroading was staying alive.
Certainly around the turn of the century some boxcars were designed with internal panels which could be folded out of the way to provide a boxcar or folded down to make a hoppered floor. These cars had bottom doors.
Other boxcars just had traps in the floor in the same way that many of our coal wagons had. When the grain (or coal) stopped dropping out of its own accord someone climbed in with a shovel. If you were in luck and had an engine on hand a bit of a bump might do some of the work for you.
Of course, the problem with simple doors in the floor is that they can easily leak.
14 ROUNDHOUSE