Forty-foot automobile cars

Many modelers think first about 50-foot cars if asked about automobile cars. (The AAR definition until the middle 1950s was that any double-door box car was an “automobile” car, regardless of whether it was equipped to carry automobiles, or was ever assigned to carry automobiles.) And indeed, the 50-foot cars were the predominant type. But there were substantial numbers of 40-foot automobile cars also. 

Initially, many of these 40-foot cars were indeed assigned to carry automobiles. But as the size of automobiles increased after World War II, more and more of the 40-foot cars were re-assigned to general merchandise service, and auto racks were removed. They were then classed as AAR XM type instead of XAR or XMR.

One interesting use of such cars in the Far West was lumber service. Indeed, the 40-foot double-door car was a preferred car for lumber service, including bundled lumber and plywood, along with loose lumber. My own modeled railroad is the Southern Pacific, which certainly had such cars, as did the Great Northern and Northern Pacific. But when cars were in short supply, cars of almost any railroad would be pressed into service, including the XMR types, which had auto racks that could be secured against car roofs for merchandise loading.

Here’s an illustration (C&O Historical Society photo at Ashland, Kentucky, about 1940), of a 40-foot automobile car loaded with lumber and being unloaded through the side door (note that only one is open).

A traffic example I found among the McCloud River Railroad papers (when working on Jeff Moore’s book, The McCloud River Railroads, Signature Press, 2016), was empty 40-foot double-door cars from Baltimore & Ohio, New York Central, Wabash, Grand Trunk Western and Pennsylvania, along with cars from Western railroads, delivered from the Great Northern for loading by the McCloud River Lumber Company. As I said, when car supply was short, railroads used whatever they could get.

On my layout, lumber is delivered on team tracks either on flat cars and gondolas (rough lumber) or in boxcars (finished lumber). Naturally I include 40-foot automobile cars for these cargoes. One example, playing off the prototype photo above, is a Pere Marquette double-door car, shown below paired with a flat car of rough lumber on the team track in my town of Ballard. (This model is a 3D-printed one-piece car by Eric Boone, as I describe awhile back: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2022/04/a-3-d-printed-freight-car-part-3.html .)

I of course vary the cars assigned in this service, as you see below, with a pair of cars being switched at Shumala on my layout. These two are, at left, an Accurail car, custom decorated for the CNW Historical Society, CNW 57892, and at right, an old C&BT Shops car, with upgraded details, B&O 298613. If I recall the waybills at the time these were in an operating session, the B&O car carried finished lumber and the CNW car, plywood. (You can click on the image to enlarge it if you wish.)

I shouldn’t give the impression that off-line cars are what I mainly use for finished lumber. Southern Pacific rostered a number of 40-foot double-door cars, and these too show up on my layout in forest products service. Below is SP 64015, Class A-50-13, a Sunshine resin model, on the team track in my town of Santa Rosalia, with a truck already positioned alongside for unloading of the box car.

I continue to use cars like this for loads other than automobiles, though of course auto traffic was quite an important revenue source for railroads. The point is that the cars were suitable for other cargo, too, particularly, as I mentioned, for lumber in the Far West.

Tony Thompson