THE 60's PT3

Now, the west end of the yard...

The west end has a few cars present, including a caboose, as well as some spare rails sitting on the ground.

The green car is a DT&I (Detroit, Toledo & Ironton) boxcar with a Hydrocushion underframe; this helps reduce the "slack action" from starts and stops, which in turn reduces the potential damage to the cargo. Given that the DT&I moved a lot of auto parts to the Ford plants in and around Detroit, these cars were put to good use. The black and silver car is a Central of Georgia car in the famous "blimp" scheme. The caboose is adorned with a then-new ACI (Automated Car Identifier) label. Introduced in 1967, these were the railroads' early attempt at trackside scanning for tracking purposes by computers. Of course, the labels needed to be clean in order for the scanners to read them -and freight cars don't get washed! Not surprisingly, the railroads abandoned the effort after about a decade of trying -but the labels lasted on car sides for decades afterwards!

The middle car of a three car set of pulpwood flats is seen here, they are empty, headed back to a logging spur for more pulpwood to deliver to the paper mill in Dale City. At this time, as the area forests were logged, the smaller trees and brush were trucked to a spur and loaded on these cars. Nowadays, the "small stuff" gets ground up into wood chips and loaded in large hoppers and gondolas. APRR 9247 and her sisters were built in the 1930's, and still have their original Andrews trucks; since the selling point of the Andrews was the ability to re-use the journal boxes from obsolete arch-bar trucks (they are bolted on in both cases), those journal boxes are probably pretty old by now!

A pair of hoppers; one a three-bay Pillsbury car, the other a black two-bay CGW (Chicago Great Western) car. In another two years, the CGW will be owned by the APRR -to the chagrin of the CNW!

Back at the east end, another future merger acquisition the Monon, is represented by a new PS-1 boxcar, without a roof walk. The silver car is an Atlanta & West Point car. It must be a warm day -note the Lincoln Continental has its top down!

The four L&N boxcars seen last week are on the back track, for a comparison of their paint schemes. The SD35's are beside them, and the front row is all 40' boxcars; (l to r) Atlantic & East Carolina, Seaboard Air Line, Tennessee Central, and the TA&G. The Tennessee Central was in bad shape by this time; it had only posted a profit twice in the previous decade and will soon be abandoned. The Atlantic & East Carolina was purchased by the Southern in 1956, while the Seaboard Air Line, the L&N and  the Atlanta & West Point are all now part of CSX.
Next week: we've had a look at the yard traffic, now let's watch a train!