Counterweights

Tommy posted:

Have read counterweights were used in years past when freight cars were asymetrically loaded. Were these weights standardized? Who determined if a weight was necessary? What did the counterweights look like? Were they cast with railroad name?  Were there regulations regarding asymetrical loading?

Never heard of such a thing!  Besides, why would ANY railroad add "dead weight" to a piece of freight rolling stock?

There is a blog posted by an elderly retired railroader car repairman who describes utilization of counterweights to equalize stress on the bolsters.

Tommy:

I’ll have to agree with Jack; I’ve never heard of anything like this being done with rail cars.

The rule of thumb with freight car loading has always been to balance the load.  And if a car’s weight was not balanced; you removed then reloaded lading in such a manner that it was.

Curt

Thanx . The practice is described in a youtube blog - he has many - by the youtube name "Pwalpar vlog", a retired railroader. He describes inspecting for a gap on each side of the bolster to avoid a condition called "hard down on the side bearings" due to asymetrical loading, and the use of either counterweights or reloading the car to rectify the condition.

This was quite common on special loads or "High Wide" loads. We had a big derailment because the counterweight used fell off of the car.

Absolutely not. The required side bearing clearance is the sum of both sides. It is common to have no side bearing clearance on one side, even when the car is empty. Some passenger cars were set up with zero clearance on diagonal corners  to avoid rocking.  Dining cars often were out of balance because the kitchen was on one side and a hallway was on the other. In those cases the springs were adjusted to give the car more support on the heavy side and to get the car to sit level. The only case of ballasting a car I can recall was a series of cabooses where an order was split between two railroads. One railroad uses locomotive batteries in the caboose, the other used light weigh truck batteries. There several thousand pounds of steel was added where the missing locomotive batteries were as the cheapest way to address the issue. This from a man who spent 45 years in the car department.