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Friday, October 11, 2019

Partial loads for open-top cars

Most open-top car loads are full loads, and in fact the common notation on waybills, that a car is loaded to ‘full visible capacity,” is a common sign of that. This would apply to practically any bulk load, from coal to ballast to sugar beets to ore minerals. It often applies as well to flat car loads such as lumber, structural steel, and many other cargoes.
     But there were conditions where this would not be true. One example is a load which originally filled a car, but part of it has been unloaded before you see the car. This might well be the case, for example, with a carload of ties, where part of the load might be unloaded at one work site, then the balance of the load sent to a second work site. This was the idea behind my own half-car tie load, described in a previous post (you can see that post at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2019/02/open-car-loads-ties-in-gondolas.html ).
     Another example is Southern Pacific’s delivery of company coal (and probably other railroads did much the same). Company facilities such as depots, section houses, signal maintainers’ houses, and any facility with a stove, such as a freight house or sand house, would receive household coal. I discussed this in describing plans for the gondola cars in my freight car fleet (that post is at: http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2011/04/choosing-model-car-fleet-8-gondolas.html ), and followed up on the topic with additional comments on how I make removable loads for coal and other bulk materials (visit this link: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2012/02/open-car-loads-bulk-materials.html ).
     Of course, a particular depot or roundhouse or caboose service facility (coal for caboose stoves) would hardly receive a cargo of 50 tons of coal. At a large SP yard or engine terminal, where there might be several coal consumers, a whole car might be needed, but in smaller towns, a half-load or even less would be the likely delivery. I wanted to model such a load so that it could arrive at a house track or other suitable location on the layout.
     To do this, I simply made up a short platform of balsa, following the method shown in the post cited first in the third paragraph of the present post, added a little mounded shape on the top with paper mache, and glued on real coal. What you see below is the width of a gondola interior and about half the car length.


When placed in a car, this looks like around half a carload, maybe less, and I enhance the look with some added loose bits of coal. Obviously the end of a partially unloaded pile will not have neat edges. It may look like this (slightly different every time). You can click to enlarge.


The model here is an upgraded Ulrich GS gondola.
     Someone always asks, at about this point, “But how do they unload it?” The best answer might be, they unload it the old-fashioned way, with shovels. That’s what the men in this gondola are doing with a load of sand, proving that even a drop-bottom gondola is not self-clearing. And of course once all the material is on the ground, it will probably be re-shoveled into some kind of single pile (photo from the Richard Hendrickson collection).


     Another example of a useful part-load would be lumber. It would certainly take awhile to unload a full lumber load in a gondola or flat car (or box car), and one could readily encounter a partly unloaded car — and a partly loaded highway truck — on a team track. For an open-top car in this situation, one only needs to model a nearly-unloaded stack of lumber, suggesting that the stack has almost been removed, and perhaps also have some additional lumber on a flat-bed truck, drawn up next to the car being unloaded. Below is an example, using one of the lumber stacks I built for a previous post (it can be found here: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2019/07/more-about-lumber-loads.html ). Again, you can click to enlarge if you wish.


This photo was taken at the team track in my layout town of Santa Rosalia.
     I think using partial loads extends what we can depict with freight cargoes on a layout. I will look at more examples in a future post.
Tony Thompson

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