I think railroads with small fleets of freight cars used in MOW service
sometimes listed those cars in the ORERs so they could be sent off line
to be loaded with supplies.

There's a photo of a grey LIRR GR (or GRA?) gon on Ted's freight car
site that I think falls into this category.

An alternative would be to receive supplies in foreign road gons and
unload the supplies or pay demmurge on the cars until the supplies were
used.

Within the past 10 years I saw a string (10-20) of LIRR gons going over
the Hellgate bridge. The Long Island railroad certainly doesn't have
many customers sending goods by rail (except for junk yards).

They upheld the tradition of grey gon in MOW service too. I saw a
string of about 10 - 52 ft. Bethlehem style gons on a siding about 10
years ago.

Ed

Ed wrote:

I think railroads with small fleets of freight cars used in MOW service
sometimes listed those cars in the ORERs so they could be sent off line
to be loaded with supplies.

The YV listed all of their freight cars and passenger cars in the ORERs even
though none was to used in interchange service. Go figure...<g>

Jack Burgess
www.yosemitevalleyrr.com

The C&O 20000-series Roger Ballast Cars were always listed in the ORERs. They had ballast load limit lines marked on their sides and some even pool markings saying they had to get back to the district engineers by such dates. Apparently it was common to use them before a coal miners' strike or standard mine shut-down times, etc. to build up a stockpile in the system. The Michigan car ferries also got much of their coal brought up from WV and KY via ballast cars.

Al Kresse