On May 4, 2013, at 2:20 PM, Anthony Thompson <thompson@...> wrote:

Jim Betz wrote:

My question is "how common is it for a car to have two different trucks under it?" Rare? Sorta rare? Fairly common for some RRs in some eras?

Pretty common, if you look carefully at photos (but still a minority of all freight cars). But I think a roller bearing with a plain bearing would have been VERY rare.

I have many photos of older cars where a truck was changed out (probably off-line) and replaced with a different truck than the original one because that was what the shop had where the replacement took place. However, the replacement truck was always of the same nominal capacity and of the same general type. An extreme case would be an Andrews (probably original) on one end and an ARA cast steel truck with integral journal boxes on the other. (And please, guys, let's stop calling ARA and AAR trucks "Bettendorf"; a Bettendorf truck was one either made by or designed and patented by Bettendorf, and most of the integral-journal-box trucks made in the 1920s were NOT Bettendorf trucks. In fact, Bettendorf went out of the truck business entirely in 1942.)

An Andrews with a roller bearing truck? Tony is being cautious; I'm willing to say never.

I thought I'd see if I had a photo which shows what kind of trucks the SSW cars in that number series had, but it turns out that 40432 is a bogus number; in the period covered by this list, the Cotton Belt owned no 40' steel box cars with numbers between 35849 and 46000. Judging from the photos I do have, SSW postwar steel box cars typically had either AAR self-aligning spring-plankless trucks or ASF A-3s.

Richard Hendrickson

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