|
Re: SOO 136000
Benjamin Hom
Ron Merrick wrote:
"Then shouldn't the answer be 'no'? I think you're describing a roof that's different than the one in the photo, which is the one I'm looking for." No, you misunderstood my post. The part is a match to the roof in the photo of the roof of SOO 42470. However, I am puzzled by the presence of seam caps visible in the builder's photo, which don't correspond with anything in the roof photo. Ben Hom
|
|
|
|
Re: SOO 136000
mopacfirst
Ben:
Then shouldn't the answer be 'no'? I think you're describing a roof that's different than the one in the photo, which is the one I'm looking for. Ron Merrick
|
|
|
|
Re: Was Fleet Composition, Now Canadian Cars - 17000 CN cars in 1950 in US
Robert kirkham
Tim – can you explain what you’re thinking in your first paragraph in a
little greater detail? I follow why the difference between US cars on the
CNR versus the number of CN cars in the US might say something about the mix of
owners of rolling stock to be seen on the CNR. But I don’t follow why that
is relevant to the point some are making that one would find Canadian boxcars in
the USA.
In fact, take a silly example: if there was a like number of US cars
in Canada, doesn’t that make the concentration of US road cars on US rails lower
than it would be if there were no US cars in Canada? And in that context,
doesn’t that result in the percentages of Canadian cars on US rails increasing
as a proportion of the whole?
Regarding 2%: another observation is that if CN had 17000 cars in the USA,
how many did CPR have at the same time. Now we’re up to 4%???
Rob Kirkham
From: mailto:STMFC@...
Sent: Tuesday, July 28, 2015 8:16 AM
To: STMFC@...
Subject: Re: [STMFC] Was Fleet Composition, Now Canadian Cars -
17000 CN cars in 1950 in US > Next letter shows the number of CN cars in 1950 on US rails is a respectable 17,000 That's interesting, but it represents what, maybe 2% of all US box cars in 1950? What would be more interesting is to know the DIFFERENCE between the number of US box cars on CN at one time versus the number of CN box cars on US rails. I'd guess this number is much less than 17,000. In the 1950's NP and GN annual reports, both roads report a constant shortage of box cars on their rails, i.e. the total number of box cars on their railroad at any given time was LESS than the number of box cars they owned. And when they bought new cars, those cars would disappear for long periods of time. GN had to struggle each year to stockpile enough box cars of its own (typically older cars) to handle the wheat harvest. Tim O'Connor
|
|
|
|
Re: fleet composition
John Larkin
I've never seen a "published" schedule for UP trains but I did work in Schedule Control where we had a 24/7 operation to schedule priority trains across the UP system, this back in the 1980 time period. We typically would monitor the status of the inbound connections (i.e., #247 off the C&NW) and then provide North Platte with the instructions on when to expect the trains and what connections should be made, when scheduled freight trains might be held for a late connection, etc. The hottest trains were normally the auto parts trains (2) and the UPS connections. Back then Amtrak was also a hot train and we took pride in keeping it on schedule. Each train had a scheduled time of arrival and departure but that was all on our timesheets (typed back then) where we logged the OS reports from dispatchers. Going to a 24-hour clock, as we do now, would have been very advantageous, particularly during the winter months when we had major storm delays hit western Nebraska and Wyoming. One of the few areas where we disagreed with our boss on was the desire to keep drag freights at 125 cars or more. During cold snaps it would often take 2-4 hours just to pump the air up in the yard at North Platte (westbound was our emphasis) and if a train made a stop enroute, say for a meet, the -20 degree temps would produce more delays because it would still take 20-30 minutes to release air on the 150 car monsters they insisted on running during the winters (to save labor costs). That's when an office job looked pretty good. There may have printed schedules outside our office but I never saw any and computers were mainframe only around UP back then. John Larkin
|
|
|
|
Re: Warpage of Resin Castings (was Virtual RPM Meet?)
Andy Carlson
Though JP's post seems to be a BCC to this group, resin casting warpage is certainly a common problem among STMFC'ers. For less drastic warpage than JP describes, I have a simple method of straitening warped castings. I have a large aluminum stock pan with a very flat bottom which when heated over a low flame on the range top is hot enough to allow relaxing of the resin parts. I simply press the resin parts down gently with my finger tips, which removes the warp and leaves the parts flat. Not a lot of heat is necessary, as you are not trying to sear a pork chop. I remove the pan from the heat and upon cooling remove the now warp-free casting. I believe that this action also contributes to heat curing and the part is now more warp-resistant than before. -Andy Carlson Ojai, CA
|
|
|
|
SOO 1932 ARA Boxcar (was: Re: SOO 136000)
pennsylvania1954
Are there any online photos of 41800-42798/135800-135998 with the block SOO LINE scheme?
Steve Hoxie Pensacola FL
|
|
|
|
Re: SOO 136000
Dennis Storzek
Rats... Forget what I said about nine laps... I misread the center line. What I said about revisions still holds true.
Dennis
|
|
|
|
Warpage of Resin Castings (was Virtual RPM Meet?)
JP Barger
Rich & Tony et al, Your description of resin castings flattening (dewarping) when heated and rewarping when cooled reminded me of my own similar observations when I began with early resin castings. But as both of you probably figured out, if you restrain the castings while they are cooling, the will remain in their intended configuration. This is easily accomplished by carefully putting one or more castings between two smooth surfaced flat heavy pieces of metal. A resin sandwich, so to speak. The pieces of metal and castings are put on a shallow aluminum baking tray with a rim and placed on an oven shelf. The oven can be preheated. A little experimentation with a scrap piece or two of the SAME resin material can determine the hottest setting for your particular oven, and the time needed to straighten your kit parts. When your parts have straightened, take the baking tray out of the oven and put it on a cooling pad (oven mitt or two or equivalent).Wait until you can touch or handle the metal pieces or a little longer and then uncover the castings They should be back in their “as cast” configuration. If not, recycle them with the same process.
Where to get the requisite pieces of metal? All machine shops, especially those focused on milling, have cutoff end pieces that they sell to used metal dealers. Make friends with your local machine shop superintendent: he’ll sell you a couple of pieces at scrap price or a little more, or perhaps even contribute them to more accurate resin models.
Another way to get these pieces of metal. Go to your local used tool dealer. These good folks often have cutoff pieces coming from defunct machine shops whose assets they purchased to get the hand and small power tools for resale. That’s how mine appeared. They’re steel, about a half inch thick and about three by seven inches in the other dimensions. It’s as if they were designed for the job!
I considered not writing this little piece, Tony and Rich, because with you two, I’m probably sending coal to Newcastle. I’m reasonably sure you both already know how to straighten resin castings. But then I thought there must be some new folks doing this, so it would make sense to suggest a way to successful flattening to them.
Keep up the GOOD WORK! JP
|
|
|
|
Re: Was Fleet Composition, Now Canadian Cars - 17000 CN cars in 1950 in US
> Next letter shows the number of CN cars in 1950 on US rails is a respectable 17,000 That's interesting, but it represents what, maybe 2% of all US box cars in 1950? What would be more interesting is to know the DIFFERENCE between the number of US box cars on CN at one time versus the number of CN box cars on US rails. I'd guess this number is much less than 17,000. In the 1950's NP and GN annual reports, both roads report a constant shortage of box cars on their rails, i.e. the total number of box cars on their railroad at any given time was LESS than the number of box cars they owned. And when they bought new cars, those cars would disappear for long periods of time. GN had to struggle each year to stockpile enough box cars of its own (typically older cars) to handle the wheat harvest. Tim O'Connor
|
|
|
|
Re: SOO 136000
Dennis Storzek
---In STMFC@..., <rwitt_2000@...> wrote : Dennis, The AAR roof drawing you referenced, in Section C-C it looks like the end panels are lower than the others. Can you confirm from photos if the Soo Line followed this design or had all the panels at the same height. ============ No I can't... I was at the top of the side ladder to take the roof pic, and I didn't notice it. If you look at the pic, you can count ten saddles/lap seams from the far end of the car, while the builder's photo shows there should be eleven. So, the panel in question is out of our field of view, too close to the camera. The drawing, on the other hand, indicates there should be only nine, so, while many of the details of the drawing match the photo, the drawing doesn't match in its entirety. Then again, the drawing has been revised four times, in 1941, 45, 48, and '62, so there is a good possibility this feature was introduced in a later revision. I hate to bring this up, but this us a P-S built car, Lot 5534, and the tall cars were Lot 5536, so at least general arrangement drawings should be available from the Pullman Library at IRM. Dennis Storzek
|
|
|
|
Re: LPG (was Transporting Anhydrous Ammonia)
So the shipment of LPG has been around for some time.> Cyril Durrenberger Yes, but I meant as a percentage of the product that was available. LPG tank cars didn't exist prior to 1920 as far as I know, and they seem relatively rare until after WW II. Today they can be seen by the hundreds at various locations -- like driving along the NJ Turnpike in north Jersey. So as I said, I think until the product came into widespread use, most of it got flared off. As a kid growing up in NJ I vividly recall the giant flare towers in the Delaware valley refineries. Those are virtually all gone today -- very little is wasted any more. Tim O'
|
|
|
|
Re: SOO 136000
rwitt_2000
Dennis,
The AAR roof drawing you referenced, in Section C-C it looks like the end panels are lower than the others. Can you confirm from photos if the Soo Line followed this design or had all the panels at the same height. I ask because for a few series of B&O box cars built by Pullman-Standard ~1941 they used a similar type of roof with the end panels lower at least for the side under the lateral running boards. We assume the B&O choose this construction for general purpose box cars following AAR standards because of their restrictive clearances. The unique wagon-top design worked OK, but by 1941 the B&O was done with their "wagon-top" experiments and starting to follow AAR standards. Regards, Bob Witt
|
|
|
|
Re: SOO 136000
Benjamin Hom
Dennis Storzek asked: "Can you confirm it is this? https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/STMFC/photos/albums/639989559 The photos are of the Soo's "1932 AAR" cars, actually built in 1936 with wider (9'-2" IW) bodies." Yes. The Rydarowicz part is a 12-panel roof with no corrugations, no external carlines, and single rivet lines at the seams. Ben Hom
|
|
|
|
Re: Westvaco
Tony Thompson
I would like to make a couple of points that seemed to have slipped by people in this thread. First of all, West Virginia Pulp and Paper Corporation did not change its name to Wesvaco until 1969, therefore of limited interest by that name to this group. Second, the location of the soda ash mining operation of the Westvaco Corp. in Wyoming is located near a place called West Vaco, and the map shows a West Vaco Road nearby. Both these point are readily found via Google.
Tony Thompson Editor, Signature Press, Berkeley, CA 2906 Forest Ave., Berkeley, CA 94705 www.signaturepress.com (510) 540-6538; fax, (510) 540-1937; e-mail, tony@... Publishers of books on railroad history
|
|
|
|
Re: fleet composition
devansprr
Mike,
Did UP have any published freight train schedule and consist books? The PRR had a pretty extensive freight plan based on hundreds of "arranged freights" scheduled between different city pairs. Times were primarily to protect delivery times (1 day, 2 day, etc.) - all PRR freights ran as extras. The books have appeared on e-bay, but they are very rare. I was able to buy one and the insight it gives into freight train consists is significant. There has been a lot of speculation in the PRR world about how closely this "plan" was followed, but we have found data in the PA state archives (saved when Conrail was formed), from the WWII era that does support the theory that the schedules and blockings were adhered to as much as practical. That should help a PRR modeler to properly populate through freight trains based on origin and destination pairs for specific traffic (e.g. stock cars, reefers, and the PRR's early container service.) Unfortunately individual surviving PRR conductor consist reports are almost unknown, but some of the traffic study data does show two frequent operational tools specific to trunk line traffic: 1) For really busy city pairs (such as between East St. Louis and Enola yard in Harrisburg, PA), multiple "sections" would be run daily, but throughout the day, not one behind the other as would often happen in TT&TO (PRR main/trunk line traffic was ABS/operator controlled.) Those sections would have similar makeup, simplifying the staging issue. 2) For "light" city pairs, it was clear the PRR didn't like to "under-utilize" locomotives, while still meeting delivery times, so they might combine two different "arranged freights" over some divisions that were common to the two different arranged freight city pairs (e.g. a shorter train from Toledo to Baltimore might be combined with a "short" train from Cincinnati to NYCity while operating between Pittsburgh and Harrisburg, without reclassification.) That would imply that between layout runs, two through trains in staging could legitimately swap the back halves of their trains once they returned to staging before heading out again as different trains. While car numbers would be repeated, the unique nature of the consist of the now four trains out of staging might be quite reasonable. I wonder if any such behavior might be detected in the Fraley books? (e.g. break the stats for trains into front half and back half, and see if the different halves begin to correlate.) Empty routing/blocking can also be quite revealing. On the PRR, over significant portions of the mainline, it appears that western road WB empties may have been blocked to either Chicago or St. Louis pretty far east in the system. So WB ATSF empties would not appear very often with WB GN empties as they traveled west of Harrisburg (and WB NYC empties would not be seen at all.) So while the N-G theory on boxcar distribution should hold up well for trunk line loads, it would not work for individual strings of empties between certain city pairs (e.g. during WWII one would not expect to see many WB Southern box cars between Crestline, OH and Chicago, nor southbound GN empties into Potomac Yard in DC, since there was a massive imbalance between EB box car loads and WB box car loads.) The blocking plans for many arranged freights also highlight the perils of deriving any consist information from looking at the first few cars behind the overwhelming number of "head-end" photos, or cabin-end photos for that matter too. Dave Evans ---In STMFC@..., <brockm@...> wrote : Tim O'Connor writes: "I REALLY think this whole issue can be greatly simplified for most layouts." Tim goes on to explain that even with relatively small numbers of cars in a fleet, if a smaller number is used to genrate a train, the odds strongly argue that the train's consist will be different...even for the same kind of train [ example, stock train ]. No arguement on that. However, my analysis of my Fraley was to determine the % of the total number of trains [ 34 ] that would be considered a particular type of train. I was not trying to make such trains unique. IOW, I now know that there were about 6 "types" of trains that could be identified by the car's consists. Their presence in the 34 trains of the Fraley are as follows: 1. Lumber: 9 trains, 26.4% 2. Reefer loaded: 4, 11.7% 3. Reefer MT: 3: 8.8% 4. Stock: 3: 8.8% 5. MT coal: 3: 8.8% 6. MT tank: 2: 5.8% 7. Other: 8: 23.5% Unfortunately [ I think ] I can't populate my layout with 34 trains. In fact, I am confined to 8 frt trains unless I use infinite staging or reduce the number of passenger trains to less than 5. The only time I tried infinite staging we had several dispatchers screaming... Anyhow, if I confine to 8 trains, I end up with 2 lumber trains, 2 reefer trains, one combined stock/MT coal, one combined MT tank/MT other, and 2 other. I can add 2 more trains through Buford staging...probably one other and one MT other. Mike Brock
|
|
|
|
Was Fleet Composition, Now Canadian Cars - 17000 CN cars in 1950 in US
np328
I know that I am late coming into this however I was off at our convention when this first broke concerning Canadian cars and had wanted to check my source data. I thought that I had uploaded this info prior however could not find it in the files, and have placed some of it in a folder entitled - Canadian Cars on US Rails.
First of all, note Special Car Order 59, contrary to what I have heard at times, it does indeed allow loading - yes loading - of a Canadian box car in the US to a US consignee, for example, a Canadian box car from Atlanta to Chicago or from Dallas to Pittsburg. Points 2 and 4 on SCO 59 support this respectively.
Next letter shows the number of CN cars in 1950 on US rails is a respectable 17,000 according to the September 1950 letter. While some US railroads perhaps had many more boxcars, if 17,000 were missing, it might cause similar concern with them. This explains why some of us, many of us need some.
The 3rd letter hits home on a portion of real estate that I intend to model, the Mpls/St. Paul to Duluth area. As you can read in the letter, there would be 44 cars each way each day on the NP, and I would believe about the same number on the Milwaukee Road which ran this same route on trackage rights over the NP.
Armand Premo was right when he commented that the traffic would really impact northern tier roads. It impacts mine. I bought quite a bit of the AAR 1937 True Line cars and still need to add more boxcars to my 1953 roster. Thank you for the Canadian Car stats others have made available.
Of the other two CP letters, these are a bit of a mystery to me and were given to me by Jerry Masters (railroad vet) when I wondered out loud to him about Canadian traffic to the US. If anyone can tell me how long this gentleman’s agreement (CP/NP) stayed in force, I would be happy to hear of it. I am sure Jerry chuckled when he sent it. Jim Dick - Roseville, MN
|
|
|
|
Early SAL hoppers
al_brown03
Can anyone direct me to a photo of a Seaboard Air Line twin hopper, class H-4 (36250-36449)? The dimensions are close to those of a PRR GLa, and I'm wondering if one could detail up a Bowser GLa to a reasonable H-4. (The only mention in the group archive dates from 2002, and the writer hadn't seen a photo.) Thanks in advance, Al Brown, Melbourne, Fla.
|
|
|
|
Re: Transporting Anhydrous Ammonia
Tony Thompson
Tom Birkett wrote:
Tidewater was a 19th century company, and they did not acquire Associated until 1926 when Standard of California sold the Associated stock to a new holding company, Tide Water Associated Oil Company. But before that Associated and its AOX fleet of tank cars was an independent company having nothing to do with Tidewater. If you want more history see the blog post I cited earlier. Tony Thompson Editor, Signature Press, Berkeley, CA 2906 Forest Ave., Berkeley, CA 94705 www.signaturepress.com (510) 540-6538; fax, (510) 540-1937; e-mail, tony@... Publishers of books on railroad history
|
|
|
|
Re: Transporting Anhydrous Ammonia
LPGs can be a refining byproduct but as long as America has produced natural
gas there have been LPGs produced (and natural gas flared, even to this day) , or actually separated in what in the industry is frequently called a "gas plant." Until a pipeline could be connected the raw gas came into the gas plant and the LPGs (mostly butane and propane) were separated out and left via tank car. If it was "sour gas" the sulphur needed to be removed. Depending on the process it could go out as molten sulphur or even sulphuric acid both in tank cars. Tidewater had fleets on the west coast (AOX) managed in San Francisco starting early in the twentieth century a Midwest fleet (TIDX) managed out of Tulsa and a fleet on the east coast (TWOX) managed out of New York. The Jan 1947 Equipment Register shows no Class V cars but those without designation may be pressure cars which appear in all three fleets. LPGs can be shipped long distances but there is little need: butane is butane and propane is propane, so buy the cheapest. Tom Birkett-Bartlesville, Oklahoma (original home of Phillips 66) From: STMFC@yahoogroups.com [mailto:STMFC@yahoogroups.com] Sent: Monday, July 27, 2015 4:58 PM To: STMFC@yahoogroups.com Subject: Re: [STMFC] Transporting Anhydrous Ammonia the car itself is a marvelous model, up to what we have come to expectfrom Kadee. Where would a Tidewater LPG car have been used? Tidewater was an east coast company, yes? Did LPG travel very long distances? I had the impression that LPG was a by-product of refining that was mostly "flared off" until a market developed for it -- So it would be available from any petroleum refinery in the STMFC era right? Tim O'Connor
|
|
|
|
Re: fleet composition
caboose9792@...
Even if Westvaco chemical and Westvaco paper were
separate companies, being complementary industries why couldn't or wouldn't they
do business? Caustic soda and chlorine just happen to be used in the manufacture
of paper and pulp processing. Reportedly the largest user of caustic Soda
is the paper industry. I guess this is getting into the operating
side of things rather than STNFC but Mr. Brock's annalists is plausible. I
suspect there is more to the "tale of to Westvaco" but that most likely fails
outside of this group's speciality.
Mark "I need a vacation" Rickert
In a message dated 7/27/2015 2:41:17 P.M. Central Daylight Time,
STMFC@... writes:
There were, however, two [ at least ] Westvaco companies. As Jeff says, FMC
|
|
|