R J Dial wrote:

I've seen pics of BAR and B&M boxcars in LA and Seattle. Stuck in my mind as always wondered what would be shipped from corner to corner of the US like that. They may have been WWII photos, but can't recall for sure.

     You're assuming they were loaded by the home road and sent to the West Coast. More likely they were loaded SOMEWHERE in the U.S. and sent there. For example, the car in Seattle might have come from LA or Houston. Car Service Rules would not encourage westward movements of those cars, of course, but after WW II, the AAR surveys found that only about 2/3 of car movements were in accord with those Rules, so there is a lot of scope for "exceptions," though they really are not even exceptions.

Tony Thompson

True on the New Haven. There was the 2-10-2 (hauling Steam Era freight cars... did I stay outta jail Mike?) that threw a tire while on the Poughkeepsie Bridge (gantlet tracked so there was no pulling up alongside with a crane) on a bitter, bitter cold night. The tire had to be sweated back on manually on the bridge.

Ted Culotta

RE: B&M cars.

There’s always the Jones and Lamson Machine Tool works from Springfield VT (Shipped on the Springfield Terminal)  Sending machine tools to Boeing (or some aviation supplier)?

 

Re: Potatoes

Were the same varieties of potatoes grown in Idaho & Maine?  I’ve no idea what kinds were grown in Maine.  My image of an Idaho potato is just the Russets, but that may be more out of ignorance (maybe I should look at the bags, next time I’m in the store ;-) than any actual knowledge of what varieties are/were grown in Idaho.

 

RE: National “pools” of cars

Boxcars and flat cars were truly national pools.  There’s  a bunch of instances in ORERs where the B&M was renumbering cars and had pleas to “send our cars home so they can get renumbered”.

Then there’s the saga of flat 33509:

            https://www.bmrrhs.org/s/BMRRM_33509_flatcar.pdf

 

[from the B&M RR Magazine July, 1951 (vol 19 No. 7)]

Ken Akerboom

FEC shipped potatoes from the 5^th district south of Miami and also the Hastings area.

Bill Michael

 

 

From: main@RealSTMFC.groups.io <main@RealSTMFC.groups.io> On Behalf Of Andy Brusgard
Sent: July 8, 2020 7:05 PM
To: main@RealSTMFC.groups.io
Subject: Re: [RealSTMFC] Apparently, Boston & Maine boxcars made it to Florida

 

Potatoes!!! 

Good thought on the lumber.  The PNW is almost all softwood.  Hardwoods would need to come from the east, like maple (duh!), red & white oak, black walnut, etc.  Toothpicks, clothes pins, and textiles (especially woolens) are possibilities.  And manufactured goods, too.

 

Thanks for more ideas.  This is great!

 

  Doug Paasch

Bob and all;

 

I see two Skelgas and at least three other (one being a UTLX), what look like ICC-105-300’s, almost certainly in compressed gas service.  Is there a production area in the vicinity?

 

Elden Gatwood

 

From: main@RealSTMFC.groups.io <main@RealSTMFC.groups.io> On Behalf Of Bob Chaparro via groups.io
Sent: Wednesday, July 8, 2020 12:42 PM
To: main@RealSTMFC.groups.io
Subject: [Non-DoD Source] [RealSTMFC] Photo: Carbon Black Car?

 

Photo: Carbon Black Car?

A 1955 photo from the Oklahoma Historical Society:

Blockedhttps://gateway.okhistory.org/ark:/67531/metadc193102/?q=train

Click on the photo to enlarge it and use the Zoom button to enlarge it further.

The covered hopper appears to be a carbon black car.

Bob Chaparro

Hemet, CA

Thanks to Tim, Doug, Claus, Lester and John for the good advice.  I was working on a softer pine desk top and tried a variety of burnishing devices, with fairly poor results.  I moved to a much harder desktop surface and tried the butt end of a wooden paint brush and my finger nail with decent results, taping down one side to allow me to see what was attaching to the paper and what was not.

 

A few more sets are on order, along with some other burnishing tools and the MS liquid decal film.  I tried Future on an early test, with middling results.  The challenge is doing a multi-color decal in layers of transfers.

 

Thanks again!

Steve Hile

On Wed, Jul 8, 2020 at 09:26 PM, Tony Thompson wrote:

One more time, guys. Box cars were free runners. They could have arrived in Seattle after being loaded ANYWHERE. Get over the idea that they had to be loaded on their home road.

One more time guys.  Prior to about 1942, there wasn't any such thing as a "free runner"
 
The photo that started this thread is of a B&M series 12100-12299 auto (not box) car built in 1910.  Although the photo quality is poor, it doesn't look like it dates to much more than a decade later.  In that context, I think the chances that it ended up in Florida as some sort of random routing event are zilch. 

I have not seen any Seattle photos, but the obvious examples of B&M cars in LA are in Speedwitch FOFC, vols 2 and 9.  Two cars total, both in 1936-37.  I would make the same case here:  it is very unlikely that they wandered down the coast having been loaded in Seattle.  That's much more of a 1945+ scenario.

Last, the important New England commodity that hasn't yet been mentioned is shoes, at least prior to WWII.  Hides came east, shoes went west.  IIRC, Woburn (MA) was the biggest center, which is why it's a SuperFund site today (chromium-6 problems).

--
Dave Parker