On Nov 29, 2020, at 6:36 PM, George Courtney via groups.io <gsc3@...> wrote:

In Ed Wolfe's book on the small, Appalachian railroad, the Interstate, he mentioned they tracked off line cars and some were months in returning.  They had to threaten the B&O who was  the worse for using Interstate hoppers in their area.  Interstate hoppers went north to piers on the great lakes.  Oddly, i have seen a 1953 photo of a Lehigh Valley twin hopper wrecked on the Interstate.  In the early days of this hobby. both Al Kalmbach and Bruce Chubb, following Al,  put out the commonsense, but inaccurate idea that cars did not travel far from home.   If a customer had an order for a hundred cars of coal and the railroad only had 90 cars, it would have been bad business practice to not use 10 foreign hoppers on your line and available.  Or you could inform the customer he would have to wait while you sent the extra foreign road cars home because you could not use them.  Perhaps a misunderstanding on my part, but I thought each ARA railroad had to contribute their share of whatever kind of regular car to the national pool for boxcars and gons and flats. If your railroad did 8% of the boxcar business, then the ARA expected you to built and contribute 8% of the boxcars which could go anywhere.  Back on topic, I've seen DVD's of the N&W moving blocks of Interstate hoppers to their docks in Norfolk.



George Courtney