Hopper bottom boxcar.....

[Puddington]

An interesting article for a 1921 Popular Mechanic's magazine about a Canadian Pacific Railway "hopper bottom boxcar" design..... anyone ever seen one of these - did anyone else experiment with this ?

http://www.trainweb.org/oldtimetrains/photos/cpr_rolling/hopper_bottom_boxcar.jpg

[CodyO]

Thats pretty cool I`m guessing there was problems since it never caught on as it does seem like a good fix to the problem of special doors for car loads

[C855B]

I suspect the conversion to use as a regular boxcar required added flooring, which created a continuing logistics problem since the car usually wouldn't be needed for loading where the flooring system happened to be.

[Bob Bufkin]

Interesting idea.  Would make sense for those roads which hauled lots of grain before covered hoppers.  Lots easier than shoveling grain out of boxcars doors.

[lock4244]

Ironic that CP had these cars back in 1921, yet turned out to be one of the last roads to use grain doors on boxcars in revenue service.

[Dave Schneider]

Then there is this thing...the covered hopper boxcar produced for the Milwaukee Road (the non-standard railroad of the world) and BC Rail.



Best wishes, Dave

[wazzou]

The Bopper.

Hard to clean from what I was told.

[Dave Schneider]

I guess they stopped before they got to the version with the removable roof so you could turn it upside down and shake it!.   

Best wishes, Dave

[Philip H]

Then there is this thing...the covered hopper boxcar produced for the Milwaukee Road (the non-standard railroad of the world) and BC Rail.



Best wishes, Dave

WOW! That's soo cool.  Dave, any drawings of this thing running around?

[DKS]

The Bopper.

Hard to clean from what I was told.

But oh my what a great bashing project. And an object of discussion that I'm sure would be dominated by cries of "no such thing!"

[Bob Bufkin]

no such thing - That can never be true because of Ed's Law.

[Dave Schneider]

WOW! That's soo cool.  Dave, any drawings of this thing running around?

None that I know about, and this image from the Morning Sun book (which I didn't scan BTW) are the only photos I have ever seen of these beasts. Personally, I like the color scheme of MILW 1 much more than MILW 2.

Best wishes, Dave

[sirenwerks]

None that I know about...

There were drawings somewhere. I remember them being full size N scale or thereabouts. I'll look for them and shoot you a copy when I find them.

[Philip H]

Siren,
If you have the drawings, I'll take a set.

Thanks Man!

[cv_acr]

Just read the caption in that scan and there's huge inaccuracies in there (or at least one that certainly jumps out).

The text states they were built by "National Marine Industries" in British Columbia. There is no such builder. The cars were built by National Steel Car in Hamilton, Ontario. Marine Industries Ltd. was another major builder in Canada, and was located in Sorel, Quebec. The author has combined the names of two different builders and listed a location that is incorrect for either of them.

These cars were also numbered BCOL 2126 and 2127, from about 1973 to 1990.