Re: interchanged head end cars
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Andy Miller <asmiller@...>
In addition to the mail and express business mentioned by several other
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posters, one other common cargo caused baggage cars to roam nation-wide. That was magazines. The printing plants for such steam era favorites as Life, Look, Colliers, and the Saturday Evening Post were heavily concentrated in Ohio and mostly serviced by the PRR. They were invariably handled in passenger train as they were time-sensitive cargo. There would be weekly loads of magazines for all parts of the country and they would be loaded into B60b baggage cars (soon to be available from Walthers) and/or X29 box cars in express service (necessary freight car content). Red Caboose has had an excellent kit for this car for some time. Foreign (to the PRR) baggage cars might also be used if they were available, to get them off the line and headed home. Does anyone know if this business was handled by the REA or did the publishers have such a large volume of regular traffic that they could ship the magazines themselves to their own distributors across the country? regards, Andy Miller -----Original Message-----
From: STMFC@... [mailto:STMFC@...] On Behalf Of ed_mines Sent: Monday, May 02, 2005 11:42 AM To: STMFC@... Subject: [STMFC] interchanged head end cars How common were foreign road head end cars? In the last year or 2 RMC had an article on a train in eastern PA which had mail and express cars from several different railroads. I would have thought that this was uncommon. A few days ago Mike Brock said that UP baggage cars (or mail cars?) were seen in NYC. Was this routine or once in a while, like for Christmas? Is anyone familiar with similar cars? Except for east coast/west coast trade (LA/NYC, SF/NYC etc.), traffic between most pairs of large cities could be serviced by one railroad (Chicago-NYC - Erie, Chicago-Boston - NYC, St. Louis-NYC - PRR, etc.) Ed |
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