-----Original Message-----
From: rwitt_2000 <rwitt_2000@...>
To: STMFC@...
Sent: Mon, May 23, 2011 1:30 pm
Subject: [STMFC] Re: Corroded hoppers




Richard Townsend wrote:

I am looking for photos of steam era hoppers with corroded slope

sheets and bottom sheets as a result of hauling (high-sulfur) coal or
sulfur. Anybody know of any?

Richard,

I know of two seminal articles about steel freight used by the B&ORR
that have illustrations of corrosion to early open-top cars; hoppers and
gondolas used in coal service. The first article discusses B&O gondolas
class O-12, O-14, and O-17, and hoppers class N-8, N-9, N-10 and N-10A.
It describes and illustrates the types of failures and the "repairs"
made to to "fix" the problems. The second articles mostly describes the
failures to the B&O class W-1 (similar to the PRR H21) and how these
coke hoppers were repaired and rebuilt in 1923. It especially notes that
copper bearing steel showed less corrosion. Both articles describe
corrosion damage to steel cars that were in service for 7 to 10 years.

1. Maintenance and Repair of Steel Freight Cars, Baltimore & Ohio
Railroad, American Engineer and Railroad Journal (became Railway
Locomotive & Cars), vol. 81, p. 161, May 1907, (18 page article).

2.Reducing the Corrosion in Steel Cars, Steel containing a small
percentage of copper adopted to prevent rapid deterioration, J.J. Tatum,
Superintendent Car Department, Baltimore & Ohio, Railway Mechanical
Engineer, vol. 97, no. 7, July 1923, pp.413-416.

If you have access to a large university engineering library you should
be able to locate these two articles. I haven't checked recently, but
PDFs of some railroad journals are in Google Books.

I would offer to copy these articles for you, but my copies are from 45
years ago when copy machines could not copy half-tone photographs in
journals so a second generation copy would be unreadable.

I hope this helps. This has been discussed in the past on this list so
possibly others have better copies of these articles.

Regards,

Bob Witt