Boxcar Sunday, Let's see your boxcars.

Changin' Times:

Rusty

My Pennsy themed layout's time frame is late 1949 (with a few exceptions).  So I'm always looking for items you would have seen at that time.  The Pennsy started its Less Than Carload (LCL) "Merchandise Service" in 1947 and it lasted until the late 1950s when it lost out to trucks.  The MS fleet had three paint schemes, the first from 1947 to 1950.  This first paint scheme is the only one I have on my layout since the others are past my time frame. 

This scheme was applied to only three classes of boxcars, the 40' X-29b, the 50' X-41b, and the 60' X-40b.  MTH has put this scheme on its 40' AAR boxcar and its 50' PS-1 boxcar to simulate the X-29b and X-41b.

While they look good and have the correct paint schemes for the length of car, the car types are not correct but beggars can't be choosers.  Hopefully someday someone will do a 60' car.

Bought my first Atlas and love the details I will definitely be purchasing more. 

CAPPilot Ron, I like the Pennsylvania box cars, also, many others. My shelves came out of a dumpster at my cabinet makes shop, free, solid Oak, I just had to sand them, stain them, attach to my train room wall. Happy Railroading.

Nothing says " Ah Ha" like the Ma &Pa! 

@leapinlarry posted:

CAPPilot Ron, I like the Pennsylvania box cars, also, many others. My shelves came out of a dumpster at my cabinet makes shop, free, solid Oak, I just had to sand them, stain them, attach to my train room wall. Happy Railroading.

Larry,

Those shelves look a lot sturdier than mine.  Very nice collection.  Love the Lionel FT.

Here is a before and after for a Weaver box car- still not sure I did the right thing with leaving  that yellow door...  ( I saw a NS box car with one and thought I would give it a try.)

Great Boxcars All!!  Leapinlarry, I would like to live near you...anyone who puts solid oak in a dumpster should be MY neighbor - am very jealous  shelves look beautiful.  My contribution this Sunday is a box car but of the automobile carrier type.  Made by Marx from 1957-1959, which is about the correct end point for these type cars on the prototype railroads.  By the end of the 1950's, RR's  had lost some 90% of the finished automobile transport business to trucks.  Open Auto racks, are what recovered the automobile transport business for railroads as it finally gave the RR's a car with more capacity than the typical truck,  began to appear in 1960. These displaced the Auto-box car rapidly and the RR's went from some 600 open racks in 1961 to some 15,000 by 1968. In the 1970's the closed auto rack became the dominant form with side panels installed to prevent vandalism.  (Note :  My data above and below is from "Railroading and the Automobile Industry", Jeff Wilson, Kalmbach Books, Waukesha, Wisconsin, 2019)

This car seemed a little small to me so I decided to check the measurements against prototype data using 1/4" to the foot.    It is small in length.   Many automobile cars (in fact 25,502 in 1947) were 40 foot cars, but the Marx car above scales out to about 33 ft so it is a bit too short.  The height inside is also too low, the average interior height of a prototype car would have been about 10 to 10 1/2 ft and this car measures about 9 ft.  Many of these cars had an internal rack to increase capacity from 2 to 4 cars which came into use from the 1930's on and which required a 12' door and 10'  interior height as a minimum.  The door opening on the Marx car is very close to scale being about 14 ft wide with both doors open (which had become standard by the 1940's) and to the left of center as were most of the prototype cars.  So Mr. Marx got close but made compromises to deal with his primary customer, someone running small tight radius layouts.  Which, by the way, is why this car and other 40 footers run really well on the Leonardtown and Savannah.  Thank you Mr. Marx!!

By the way, if you are interested in the RR's connection with the Automobile Industry and New Auto delivery and Parts traffic I recommend the Kalmbach book, it is relatively inexpensive ($19.95),  soft cover in magazine size  and full of pictures and interesting facts. 

Happy Sunday everyone

Don

Better late than never. Here is my contribution for the week.

More cars of the box kind, although reffers.

This is the MTH prototype ( first car made ) Ellicott & Sons Ice Cream Reffer.  Since Ellicott City is home of the first railroad terminus in the US, and the county seat of the county of which I live, I had to have this car. 

Got of love this Reffer with a glass lined tank. 

Of course some beer, after all it's summer ... well almost! 

So there you have it Ice Cream, Milk, and Beer ... not to be consumed at the same sitting. ;-) 

Great pics and info everyone,  thanks for contributing to this post, love ya!!!

Hi All,

I'll get the first start on this weekend's Box Car Sunday (unless someone else beats me to it) with a scratch-built box car project I did almost 40 () years ago.  Dang, where'd all that time go?!?!?!

After winning an HO scale Walthers craftsman gondola kit as a door prize at a train show and building it, I was impressed with the construction details and how easy it actually was to build.  I was partial to old time freight cars back in those days anyway, and had a small collection of MDC/Roundhouse HO scale old-timer cars in my stable.  If memory serves, I had seen some O-scale trucks and other detail parts for relatively little cost at my local hobby shop, and it occurred to me, why not try my hand at scratch-building some old time freight equipment, in O-scale?  The perfect, low cost hobby for a young college-age student on summer break with lots of time on his hands and no job or money!

I started out by taking my favorite box car at the time, an HO scale MDC/Roundhouse 36' Truss Rod Single-Sheathed Box Car, measuring it up, and then making up my own working drawings in 1/48 O-scale in order to build it.  I believe the only pre-manufactured parts I purchased were the trucks, a brake wheel, a brake cylinder, Kadee O-scale couplers, some HO scale brass rail stantions (probably closer to O-scale, if the truth is known), and a short length of tiny chain used in the brake rigging.  Everything else was bass board sheets and shapes, Strathmore board, brass wire, sheets, channels, tubing, and angles, steel staples for foot stirrups, and a few plastic shapes.  I made up jigs for bending the brass wire grab rungs and any other bent wire pieces for the model.  I hand-scribed all the bass wood sheathing (both sides of each sheet!) to represent the board planking.

But enough yacking, let's look at some pics...................................

Here's a side view of the car (obviously).  I painted it with Floquil box car red, if memory serves, some sort of brownish or burnt umber interior, and a grimy black underside.  I never did letter or decal it.  I've always been planning to, just never got around to it.  One of these days, maybe?   Talk about procrastination! 

The side doors and end door open on my model.  They slide in brass channels.

The interior is fully detailed, as you can partially see here and in a few other photos.

Some more detail on the non-brake end.  The "steel plate" corner braces on the sides/ends are made from Strathmore board, with tiny little squares of brass sheet glued on to represent square-headed bolts.

Here you can see the end door on the brake end.  For several years afterwards, I had no idea what it would have been used for on the prototype.  But, the MDC/Roundhouse car evidently had one on it, so my O-scale rendition had to have it, too.  Also a good shot of the grab rungs and the wire staple stirrup.

Here's another angle looking down at the top.

And a shot of the bottom.  I don't remember who made the trucks, they're plastic archbar trucks and sprung.  Possibly Athearn?  Like I say don't remember, and don't even know if they're still available today.

Lastly, an upside down view of the non-brake end.  Phewww!  Quite the project, ehhh?

I even scratch-built the display track.  I sawed my own ties out of 1 x 4 pine on my dad's radial arm saw (I still have that saw today and use it on occasion).  I glued the ties to a 1 x 4 board and stained or painted them.  Then I stripped the rails from a piece of Atlas HO scale code 100 flex track and hand-spiked them down to the ties (every tie).  Lastly I ballasted the track with plain old kitty litter, which looked pretty good to my eye.

Well, that's what I used to do when I was young, broke, and stupid.  Now that I'm old, broke and stupid, I've been gravitating more and more to 3-rail O-gauge - heck with that 2-rail stuff! 

Hope you enjoy. 

A few GN boxcars that were nicknamed the circus boxcars.

I love the MA & PA and was really happy to find this Weaver version

Inspired by the New Haven:

Rusty

                                                            M.S. ACY.....

Williams by Bachmann, Operating Boxcar

Gary

Guys what great cars.  MIxed Freight - great car and a really good back story, thanks.  BillT - neat cars, had never heard of the GN "circus" cars before,RPMcobra - I also love the "Ma and Pa" just got an Atlas box from Trainworld and have not even opened it yet, so good things to come.  Great pictures everyone, amazing the diversity of box cars our RR had at one time.

Here is my contribution today: Not quite a box car but a Milk Car with a streamlined cover.  These were reasonably common during the peak years of RR milk traffic in the 30's (Kalambach has a neat little book on the Milk industry and RR's with lots of pictures) .  This one is from Lionel and it is labeled Burlington Northern which is a relatively new RR created by merger, so I am not sure that there exists a prototype or not.  I just liked the shape and decoration and it fits the tight curves of my layout. 

Happy BoxCar Sunday everyone.

Don

Good morning everyone.

Here is my Lionel X31a boxcar.  Unfortunately, Lionel put a little too dark paint on this one.

The bigger issue for me are the markings on the car.

The RPKD date (1-8-49) is before the build date (6-56).  Plus the car has the circle keystone which was no longer used after 1952.

The X31a boxcars were built between 1934 and 1936, so I'm guessing the 5 in 6-56 was in error.  If you can change the 5 to 3, then everything is correct.

The model boxcar Lionel used is also not correct for the X31.  As I have said before, beggars can't be choosers.

Rutland boxcar.  I took this photo while on a visit to Strassburg.  

LCCA 50th ANNIVERSARY CONVENTION ON SITE U.S.A.F. SAC  BOXCAR    GG1GUYY

Some boxcar flicks.

Have a great Box Car Sunday on this FLAG Day. 

Here's some Menards boxcars I tried to age

How about some action? Got Milk?

Wow, there’s lots of beautiful and nicely weathered and also unique box cars pictured here recently on this box car sunday forum thread. This car I’m showing is an automobile box car made by MTH, purchased years ago simply a shelf queen that’s supposedly scale in length. I thank MTH for making so many different variations of rolling stock. Hope everyone is having a great weekend, staying safe, staying healthy, continually praying. Happy Railroading 

Boxcars in daily use. 

Boys exploring the railroad yard on their bikes.  Nothing is more interesting than an empty boxcar.  

Some electrifying cargo. 

I guess express reffers are a type of boxcar? 

Thanks Larry and Patrick for all your great contributions every week. Good to see dedicated modelers enjoying their stuff. 

Larry - Maybe an Alaska R.R. trip in 2021?

More milk, please!

Ron

Love the old Pan Am logo...

I ran across this K-Line REA boxcar in patriotic colors while going through my Red-White-Blue fleet.  I bought it many years ago because there were several boxcar models in this scheme, both in N and O, so I thought it was based on a real prototype.

For fun I did some research to find a photo of a prototype car.  Well, there aren’t any.  I check several REA related web sites and my two REA related books* and nothing, so I’m assuming this car did not exist.  Oh well, it is a good looking car, nicely detailed, and goes well with the rest of my RWB cars.

*In my defense, I bought the car before the books.

Well, here we are again for another Box Car Sunday.  My contribution today is a bit of a potpourri of miscellaneous box cars.

First is a Hornby, Saxa Salt type 50 "box car" although you might almost consider it a hopper or even a tank car.

Next is a Danish Refrigerator Car or Kole Vogon I don't know much about this one, it was a flea market find when I was actually in Denmark on business a number of years ago.

NN

Then we have the Marx, GAEX "scale" box car from the 1950's . This version on "high" trucks to match up with the #21 Marx lithographed Santa Fe F-3 locomotive.

Finally a couple of classic 6464 Lionel's from the post war era.  Pulled by my Air Force AMT Beep!

Happy Box Car Sunday everyone...have a good week

Don

For this fine Sunday ... " The "cabbox" car.  A combination boxcar/cabbose.  Used by MOW crews and branch line service.  Here are a couple by MTH ( RailKing) that I weathered.  Unfortunately I was not able to front light this photo session, so the scenes in these photos turned out to be darker thus not highlighting the cars well.