Nostalgia & History > Two Odd Balls -- Help on the Second One

These photos and captions are from Alaska's Digital Archives.

1. Alaska Juneau Gold Mining Co 10 Ton Electric Hauling Motor. Locomotive engine. Photographer's number: 185
ASL-P01-1316; ASL-Juneau-Vicinity-A.J.Mine-Workmen and Equipment-23
Alaska State Library-Historical Collections

2. Railroad car connected to clinic. From folder titled: Public Health / Railroad Unit.
ASL-P143-0731
Alaska State Library-Historical Collections

The second caption is not much help. The car reads "Alaska Railroad" on it's letter board. 6-wheel caboose trucks! A rear parlor. Car length radio antenna. Has to be a hospital car or a rolling clinic given the caption. Ideas? Who made it? ARR bought a lot of secondhand passenger cars from the Lower 48 railroads over the years. I can't find it on John's Alaska Railroad Web Page roster. I sent him an email asking about it.


Marty Bernard



Edited 4 time(s). Last edit at 08/26/14 10:44 by MartyBernard.

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Just guessing, but the roof on that thing looks like the roof on the former Caribou Creek. Maybe this is what it looked like before they converted it to a business car?

Re: caboose trucks: perhaps they were referring to the prominent leaf springs?

Brian Ehni

I called them 6-wheel caboose trucks because of the leaf instead of coil springs. Yes, they don't look like normal 4-wheel caboose trucks.

Marty

A former heavyweight that was "stream-styled" as it was called back in the day...

Bill Deaver
Tehachapi, CA

MartyBernard Wrote:

> The second caption is not much help. The car
> reads "Alaska Railroad" on it's letter board.
> 6-wheel caboose trucks! A rear parlor. Car length
> radio antenna. Has to be a hospital car or a
> rolling clinic given the caption. Ideas?

Some discussion of this photo is here:

http://alaskarails.org/historical/clinic-car/index.html

That electric looks like the big brother to the two mining locomotives that wound up in Santa Cruz County at the Pacific Cement & Aggregate Plant that I visited in 1968. I rode the quarry train up to the hillside mine--going down hill, the air compressors were running almost constantly.

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MartyBernard Wrote:
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> I called them 6-wheel caboose trucks because of
> the leaf instead of coil springs. Yes, they don't
> look like normal 4-wheel caboose trucks.
>
> Marty

Looks like a standard 6 wheel heavyweight passenger car truck to me.....did I miss something? These types of trucks normally had both leaf and coil springs. The photo is not clear enough (for me) to see if there are coil springs lurking near the leafs. Could be these trucks were modified by AAR.



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 08/27/14 05:57 by ATSF3751.

Any chance that rebuilt heavyweight is an ex-B&O car? They built similar cars at Mount Clare for their early streamline passenger trains, like the Royal Blue and Cincinnatian.

NZ

Agree, strongly, with the suggestion this is a former B&O car. AA

Stanford White
Carmel Valley, CA