Dennis Storzek wrote:

I might also point out that there is no reason why a car should get it's periodic re-weigh on the home road; many did, but many did not.

This is an interesting point, Dennis. I've routinely looked at freight car photos with this subject in mind (among lots of others of course), and I have the IMPRESSION that the considerable majority of reweigh symbols ARE on the home roads of cars. Has anyone done this more systematically, or actually acquired statistics on the point? My own decaling practice is to use almost all home road reweighs, but I'll certainly change if there is specific evidence to the contrary.

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, thompson@...
Publishers of books on railroad history

Most extant M&StL car cards show reweighs by giving weight, month and year and railroad but not shop location or symbol. Darn! Almost useful information. My memory of the cards is that most, if not all, had at least one reweigh on another road.

Gene Green

Dennis Storzek wrote:

I might also point out that there is no reason why a car should get
it's periodic re-weigh on the home road; many did, but many did not.

Tony replied:
This is an interesting point, Dennis. I've routinely looked at
freight car photos with this subject in mind (among lots of others of
course), and I have the IMPRESSION that the considerable majority of
reweigh symbols ARE on the home roads of cars. Has anyone done this
more systematically, or actually acquired statistics on the point? My
own decaling practice is to use almost all home road reweighs, but
I'll certainly change if there is specific evidence to the contrary.

Tony,

IIRC, Greg Martin commented on this a few years back. His extensive
photo survey showed about 20% off-line repacks and around 10% off-line
reweighs.

Regards
Bruce Smith
Auburn, AL

--- In STMFC@..., Anthony Thompson <thompson@...> wrote:

This is an interesting point, Dennis. I've routinely looked at
freight car photos with this subject in mind (among lots of others of
course), and I have the IMPRESSION that the considerable majority of
reweigh symbols ARE on the home roads of cars. Has anyone done this
more systematically, or actually acquired statistics on the point? My
own decaling practice is to use almost all home road reweighs, but
I'll certainly change if there is specific evidence to the contrary.

Tony,

I can't disagree that most cars were re-weighed on their home road, and I don't know that anyone has ever made a study of it. However... The topic of re-weighing cars came up on the Canadian Pacific Historical Association list at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/cpsig/ a while back, and one of the members who was a long time CPR employee recalled the car foreman at one of CP's minor terminals on the old Kettle Valley line in British Columbia instructing his car inspectors to specifically look of out-of-date foreign cars, pull them, and re-weigh them. It seems he felt the AAR standard fee for doing so would count as income to offset some of the expense his little outpost represented to the bean counters in Montreal. :-)

I can't believe that something similar wasn't done elsewhere, back in the day.

Dennis

Bruce Smith wrote:

IIRC, Greg Martin commented on this a few years back. His extensive photo survey showed about 20% off-line repacks and around 10% off- line reweighs.

Thanks, Bruce. That is consistent with my general impression, so I'll continue to do only an occasional off-line reweigh symbol <g>. I use a lotta Pennsy symbols for those!

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, thompson@...
Publishers of books on railroad history

On May 31, 2010, at 12:28 PM, Bruce Smith wrote:

IIRC, Greg Martin commented on this a few years back. His extensive
photo survey showed about 20% off-line repacks and around 10% off-line
reweighs.

Though I haven't done a statistically rigorous sample, I have about
the same impression from my own freight car photo collection (which
is considerably larger than Greg's). Bear in mind that any car which
got significant maintenance or repairs off line had to be reweighed
and restenciled before it was released from the foreign road's shops
if its light weight might have been affected (e.g., replacement of a
coupler or a wheel set). So it wasn't just a matter of the weight
data being out of date, though that often happened off-line as well.
Even if the weight hadn't changed from what was stenciled on it, the
shop symbol and date were repainted.

With regard to faded reweigh stenciling, the photos in my collection
show many examples of that as well. Restenciling was done with fast
drying paint which often wasn't as durable, and didn't weather as
well, as the paint and lettering applied by the car builder or by the
owner's shops when a car was repainted. Often there was a noticeable
contrast between the durable, though somewhat dirty, original "CAPY,
LD LMT, LT WT" stenciling and the numbers, shop symbol, and date
which had been added later but, after a couple of years on the road,
were more faded and heavily weathered than the original stenciling.

Richard Hendrickson