Anyone want to comment of the date of the photo on the dust jacket?

There are few single sheathed box cars (maybe 1/10th) and few flat
roofed box cars like X29s.

My guess is the photo was taken early '50s, but how late? '52? '53?

There's a 40 ft. B&O box with a very wide door & an L&N car with
the "old reliable" slogan. Also a Southern PS1, box car with a
diagonal roof, "SantaFe all the way" slogan

There are a lot of PRR cars and the photo came from the Penn state
museum so my guess is that the photo was taken on the Pennsy. There
are no Keystone shadow heralds which might help Pennsy men date the
photo.

There's a 40' PRR box car, maybe an X37A, with a light colored,
ribless roof. Was that roof unpainted (did PRR leave roofs
unpainted?)? The 50' car to it's right (X37B?) also has a ribless
roof which is darker than the side. Does this car have a black or car
cement coated roof?

There are a lot of photos of Erie cars that I've been looking for for
years. Most of them have yellow (gold) heralds too. I've been
interested in freight cars for years and this book taught me a lot.

This is a fantastic book, both for pictures and text. Thanks guys.
This has been a terific year for STMFC books.


Ed

Ed Mines wrote:
"My guess is the photo was taken early '50s, but how late? '52? '53?

There's a 40 ft. B&O box with a very wide door & an L&N car with
the "old reliable" slogan. Also a Southern PS1, box car with a
diagonal roof, "SantaFe all the way" slogan."

The L&N "Old Reliable" slogan places the photo no earlier than 1952.


"There are no Keystone shadow heralds which might help Pennsy men
date the photo."

What do you mean the lack of Shadow Keystones don't help me date the
photo? The absence tells me that it's pre-1954.


"There's a 40' PRR box car, maybe an X37A, with a light colored,
ribless roof. Was that roof unpainted (did PRR leave roofs
unpainted?)?"

Not in this era - note that the running board the same color of the
roof. Also observe that the rest of that car's paint and lettering
appears to be clean.


"The 50' car to it's right (X37B?) also has a ribless roof which is
darker than the side. Does this car have a black or car cement coated
roof?"

If it's 50 ft long, the car is NOT an X37 subclass - it's an X38.
It's entirely possible, as the lap seam roofs installed on the X29
and 1930s program boxcars leaked, and some cars had black car cement
applied to the roofs as a stopgap. It's also entirely possible that
it's a result of soot - remember, steam was still very evident on the
Pennsy during the early 1950s.


Ben Hom

Ben



Unless I am missing something their absence only indicates the car was last
painted before the changeover to the SK style.



Unless Pennsy paint shops did something other railroads didn’t and repainted
all their cars very quickly when a new standard was adopted, there could
have been many years go by before cars painted in 1953 needed a repaint.



If the car had the new style it would have dated the photo to a date after
the adoption of the shadow keystone, but the absence of the new monograms
only narrows things down to a probable range of dates which extends some
considerable time past the date this style first came into service.



Aidrian

Aidrian Bridgeman-Sutton wrote:
"Unless I am missing something their absence only indicates the car
was last painted before the changeover to the SK style.

Unless Pennsy paint shops did something other railroads didn't and
repainted all their cars very quickly when a new standard was
adopted, there could have been many years go by before cars painted
in 1953 needed a repaint.

If the car had the new style it would have dated the photo to a date
after the adoption of the shadow keystone, but the absence of the new
monograms only narrows things down to a probable range of dates which
extends some considerable time past the date this style first came
into service."

The first boxcars delivered new in the Shadow Keystone scheme were
the Class X48 PS-1s built February 1954. There is some debate when
the first repainted cars appeared, but it appears that repaintings
began concurrently in early 1954. (As an aside, a photo of Class
X29B PRR 25713 in SK1a shows a reweigh date of January 1951 - another
reason why that data is NOT a "repaint date", as the car was probably
painted without being re-light weighted.)

As you pointed out, it took time for the railroads to repaint freight
cars after a new paint scheme was adopted; however, the thing that
struck me about the photo was the large number of PRR freight cars in
the photo combined with the total lack of cars in Shadow Keystone
paint schemes. Note also that at the top of the photo the river is
free of ice and the leaves on the trees are well-developed,
indicating that this is late Spring at the earliest. I can identify
at least ten PRR boxcars in the foreground of the photo. If this is
indeed a 1954 photo, and if boxcar repainting into SK began in
February 1954, I would think I would see at least one by the time
this photo was taken. I agree that the factors that you listed above
have to be taken into consideration, but I'm still standing by my
assessment that this is a pre-1954 photo.


Ben Hom

The photo on the cover of the book "The Postwar Freightcar Fleet" is
from the Hollyman PRR publicity photograph collection at the PA state
Archives. Tom Hollyman was a commercial photographer who was hired by
the PRR to photograph railroad facilities, industries and available
sites for new industries as part of a major campaign by the PRR to lure
new industries to their lines. There are several hundred photos.
Freight cars, often a large number of freight cars, appear in many of
the photos.

There were six separate jobs involving Tom Hollyman, and the photo
collection is organized by job number as follows:
Job 4887 - New York Division, New York harbor
Job 5245 - Chicago, Whiting, Indiana Harbor
Job 5321 - Fort Wayne, Decatur Ind, Fort Wayne Division, Toledo,
Sandusky, Columbus O
Job 5382 - Panhandle Division, Eastern Division, Pittsburgh, Cleveland,
Ashtabula, Buffalo
Job 5461 - Buffalo, Oil City, Conemaugh Division, Cresson to Altoona
Job 5497 - Altoona, Middle Division, Enola, Harrisburg, Philadelphia
Division, Philadelphia, Maryland Division.

The cover photo is Job 5497, Roll 11, Negative 126, The caption reads:
Freight classification yard, car repair and receiving yard are shown in
this aerial view of the Pennsylvania Railroad's vast freight train
movement near the Enola yards near Harrisburg, PA. (I believe that the
caption should read "in the Enola yards.")

There are no dates listed in the PA state Archives description of the
collection. However, there are dates in a few of the captions and there
are other date clues in the images. Bob Johnson, who has copying
machine copies of the photos, has examined them today with the
following results:
1) There are no freight cars in shadow keystone scheme in any of the
photos.
2) The best estimate for the dates of the entire collection are summer
1952 to fall 1953.
3) The best estimate of the date for the cover photo is summer or fall
of 1953.

Thanks to Bob for taking the time to look through several hundred
images and captions.

Larry Kline
Pittsburgh, PA

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]