I must have been wrong about "old rivets". Here are a string on GG1's being scrapped in 1979 at Midwest.

Chris S.

The Huckleberry Railroad in Flint, Michigan has a 3’ gauge D&RGW “short” caboose, #0526 that was officially “retired” by the D&RGW in the 1950’s, removed from the books, and was presumed scrapped for many years. But, instead it fell through a knothole in the records, and we have it, now restored. D&RGW fans are still confused. It now has good company since HRR also has K-27 #464, a good match for it. How that happened is a bit of a story, but don’t believe everything “in the books” … even good references can be wrong.

Ken Akerboom wrote:

Up thru 1930, cars were noted "sold for scrap"
Starting in 1931, cars were noted "Retired" (or "Retired a/c age")

Anyone know if there was an accounting or ICC reporting or ? change at that point in time?
Or is this just a "B&M Thing"

Note other cars were noted "Destroyed" (I assume that means "wrecked"), so it's not that.

In the SP car ledgers I have seen, “retired” meant “removed from revenue service.” Some cars were subsequently selected by the MOW people for their use (moving to a different ledger), and some cars were sold “as-is” to short lines, so “retired” did not mean demolished.

Tony Thompson
tony@...

Looking thru the B&M car disposal records (coming, eventually, to the web site), one thing I noticed...

Up thru 1930, cars were noted "sold for scrap"
Starting in 1931, cars were noted "Retired" (or "Retired a/c age")

Anyone know if there was an accounting or ICC reporting or ? change at that point in time?
Or is this just a "B&M Thing"

Note other cars were noted "Destroyed" (I assume that means "wrecked"), so it's not that.

--
Ken Akerboom

George,
  Simply put the coupler "up" and apply a few drops of water and
the glue will soften and you can "fix" your mistake.  Let the
water sit on it for 15-30 minutes - or "as long as it takes".  It
will soften and you can take it apart and clean it all up and 
start over.
  Personally, I'd probably figure out a way to use styrene 
cement for anything related to "a coupler" because it will
provide a stronger/more positive joint.
                                                                                             - Jim

One of the greatest dis-incentives I've heard of was the various railroads' reluctance to spend the premium to equip interchange equipment with roller bearings.  The thought there being that the investment would disappear into interchange service and ultimately benefit "the competition."

It is bewildering that PRR or any of the other coal-hauling roads didn't see the benefit in equipping their captive fleets.  Makes you wonder what train lengths a C&O H-8 or PRR J-1 could start had the cars been equipped with roller bearings. 

$0.02,
-Jeff Ford
Sanger, Texas

Any idea why the entire loading platform (in front of the NWX reefer, to the right of the pickup) appears to be on wheels?
(look at the bottom-right, near the front track)
--
Ken Akerboom

That's an interesting car for sure.  With Pierre's oil canning effect that would make a neat HO scale car.   Did those cars make it off line at all or where they in dedicated service on specific routes?

Scott McDonald 

I have a friend whose seven year old son "purchased" an N Scale layout complete with equipment that is in the future for this group.  I needed to attach a Micro-Trains 1015 coupler to a Life-Like/Walthers switcher that was missing the attachment pin.  I tried canopy glue and it appears to have worked fine.

On the other hand, I tried canopy glue for an MTL coupler on an Intermountain tank car that is in the time period of this list, and managed to get a sufficient amount of glue into the coupler that it's now "frozen solid."  So I'm at .500, which would be great if I were a baseball player.  I suspect 'user error' in this second case.

--George Irwin

Photo: Damaged NWX/Canadian Club Reefer 14471 (1935)

Photo from Helena History website:

http://www.helenahistory.org/liquor-warehouse-in-ruins-1935.html

Caption:

“Talk had already begun by April of 1935 of moving the operations of the state liquor warehouse to a bigger facility. At the time, it was housed in the former Lindsay Fruit Co. building on Bozeman St. in the Sixth Ward. Under consideration for a new warehouse was the repurposing of the largely disused Nabisco factory at 1308 Boulder Avenue.

Before a move could be undertaken, the devastating earthquakes in October of 1935 heavily damaged both the former fruit company warehouse and the Nabisco factory, making the construction of a modern warehouse a priority.”

Bob Chaparro

Hemet, CA

The car to the left of the K7 is a K8. As the the K7 vs K7a: It looks to me that the notches which would retain the cross members bearing the upper deck are empty, that is, no cross pieces hence no upper deck. Does that make it a K7? See K7a diagram and photo at: http://prr.railfan.net/diagrams/PRRdiagrams.html?diag=k7a.gif&sel=stk&sz=sm&fr=

Group, 
     Does anyone know what happened to the presentation material on these cement gons from the late Ron Parisi? He had done a great amount of research and modeling as well.

Billy

ugh...

It's back.

The term bearing in the broad sense means a method to support the relative motion of one surface against another - a bearing surface, usually under some manner of "load" that need to be transferred from one surface to the other..

The vast majority of bearings are designed to reduce friction, but they are not "anti-friction". Outside of roller bearings, pretty much ALL bearings have some amount of friction.

In the case of railroad journal bearings of the original types (you can do patent searches back to the early 1800's on railroad bearings as friction bearings, to include a number of British patents), when first starting the train, the axles and bearings are truly in direct contact and suffering from significant sliding friction between the axle and the bearing.

Within a few axle revolutions, with enough oil and some manner of helping spread the oil, if the speed was high enough (I suspect at least one and maybe two mph), an oil film between the two surfaces would be established that turned the bearing into a hydrodynamic bearing, where there was no longer direct contact between the axle and bearing. But with one side of that oil film "stuck" to the axle, and the other side of that oil film "stuck" to the bearing, there is significant shear within that fluid, and shear in fluid is itself, by nearly every properly trained mechanical engineer I have ever known, referred to as "friction", which is why the oil in your car engine, which also has hydrodynamic bearings on the crank shaft, also gets hot (from the friction!) (And that same shear friction is why pressure drops along a pipe moving fluids - that is also friction.)

Which is why it was so hard to start a train with "friction bearings" and why engineers, especially steam locomotive engineers, would "take slack" so that only a few cars at a time were starting, otherwise the direct contact friction in the cars that have not yet established the hydrodynamic oil film was so high it would stall the locomotive, or exert so much drawbar pull to cause the drivers to slip.

A roller bearing can properly be called an "Anti-friction" bearing because there is NO sliding between the contact surfaces inside the roller bearing that transmit the load (weight of the car) from the truck sideframe to the axle - the contact is just like the wheel rolling on the rail.

Bottom line, there is significant friction occurring in the original railroad journal bearings, and almost no "friction" in today's modern roller bearings (there is some friction in the bearing cages, but that friction is not related to transmitting the weight of the car to the axle.)

What I really don't understand is where does this seemingly "hate" for Timken come from? Roller bearings, especially Timken's tapered roller bearings, where a vast improvement in safety and economy of freight rail. The fact that Timken stuck with it for nearly 50 years before wide spread adoption is amazing to me. The real tragedy is the refusal of railroad line engineers to adopt the technology. That refusal to accept change is not unique - having studied "disruptive" technologies one finds this to be quite common across many industries - a current example being SpaceX's Falcon 9 taking over the commercial satellite launch market from aerospace companies that refused to modernize their rockets (effectively derivatives of late 1950 ICBM's.)

The 1929 report of a test train of 100 roller bearing equipped hoppers on the PRR helps illustrate the inability of the PRR's engineering staff to understand how roller bearings work. There is a copy of the draft report in the PA state Archives that I hope to copy and analyze some day but a quick review of it about 5 years ago highlighted the almost irrational resistance to the roller bearing concept by a number of PRR engineers (that draft has a LOT of pencil'd markups.)

If there is ANY criticism due, it is of the RR's line engineers (not the locomotive engineers), refusal to change to a safer and more efficient technology (although there were economic dis-incentives to adopt roller bearings in freight service.)

Dave Evans



--
Tim O'Connor
Sterling, Massachusetts