Re: Battleship Gon After Many Battles
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mwbauers
I think just a few years later, the place that I work for, P&H Mining Equipment, made regular use of the same class of cars. They certainly were recognizable as the same battleship gons,
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We would fill it up over several days with metal chips and turning scraps from the machine shop. Then it would travel from the 4300 block of West National Avenue to about 1500 East where the big pig-iron and scrap yard was on Jones Island. That was on the south end of the same general yard used by the B&O RR car ferry dock at the north end of the yards. These cars were used for many years like that. They looked to be in much better condition than the one in the link. And yet….. they would be filled to over-flowing before they were were finally collected and moved to the steel scrap collection site. One day I was sight-seeing on Jones Island on the weekend and I got to see what was the end of one of the loaded cars. It almost made it all the way into the scrap collection company…… Almost ….. When I saw it, it was several hundred feet away from that place with the middle of the car bent down and resting on the rails. The car had broken its back with the steel scrap load piled about the middle outside of the car, where it had sort of flowed out of the now ‘V’ shaped and bowed out car sides. I had a camera with me and took some pictures, not that I know where those are today. It was different to see and considering that I had read somewhere that the battleship gons were built to haul coal, I instantly understood how the repeated loads of much heavier steel chips finally did it in. Best to ya, Mike Bauers Milwaukee, Wi
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