Page 15 - January February 2000

It also seems that such doors find it surprisingly easy to jam shut at the least convenient times. It occurs to me to wonder how much these doors were used by hobos to get into cars unseen. As well as bottom doors and hoppered floors some cars had roof hatches. The big thing with all these extra fittings was that they cost money to fit and maintain and they added to the dead weight of the car. On the other hand there was an attraction to being able to change a car’s shape and function in order to efficiently carry a back load.
Using a car in both directions not only reduces the empty car mileage but the number of cars needed.
It was probably the seasonal nature of grain movements that kept grain moving in boxcars even up to recent times. Something else that is probably relevant is the introduction of modern coatings to the inside of steel hoppers. If you look closely at your model covered hopper’s car markings they probably include notes on the liner, how it must not be cleaned and what footwear may or must not be used. This is directly related to the ability to clean out the car efficiently between loads, the bargees problems mentioned above and the need to not cross-contaminate between loads. I would expect a modern car to be far more intensively used than older
designed cars were simply because it can be returned to service faster. If you are building up a fleet for a layout this is good news for the modern image modeller: cars turn round faster and put in more miles in the modern scene. Therefore the modern image man needs fewer cars.
The modern equivalent of the slotted or nailed in grain door was the provision of a small additional door in the upper part of the plug door on some combination door boxcars. There have been articles on these cars in either Railroad Modeller or Railroad Model Craftsman. These cars were modified back to ordinary combination door cars as their role was displaced by covered hoppers and maintenance became necessary.
It would seem reasonable to expect that, just as BN 40’ cars outlived the cull of 40’ cars in recent times, earlier rulings to remove designs from interchange traffic probably left cars standing on sidings for much of the year waiting to haul seasonal loads. This may have happened to link and pin coupled cars, wood framed cars, thirty foot cars and so on. It is possibly worth noting that for many cars a full load of grain by weight would be much less than a full load by available volume.
(Try putting a covered hopper next to a boxcar of the same length, and see how
much space is not occupied around the hopper bottoms. Also bear in mind that while many covered hoppers are slab sided, the slope sheets of the hoppers extend up between the side walls leaving quite large voids between the walls). Also different grains have different densities and dry grain is much lighter than wet.
I don’t know but I imagine that modern covered hoppers probably carry the whole range of “grains” from hemp and rape, which act like different varieties of water, through wheat and barley to various beans and nuts.
Before the advent of the modern linings mentioned above and modern efficient hopper gate seals or the availability of Airslide, Centreflow and Pressure Differential cars many of the smaller seeds at least were always transported in sacks because they otherwise simply ran away. I know I have fought 180lb sacks of Hemp; the stuff wants to go anywhere in the universe but where you want it to go. Again this means a change in the car fleet. Sacks went in boxcars: more “sack type” loads meant less justification for covered hoppers. Improve the covered hoppers so that you can de-bag the awkward grains and you reduce handling, cut manpower needs, make the covered hoppers more useful and reduce the boxcar fleet. ●
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FEBRUARY 2000 15