Nostalgia & History > RRS (10): BN (GN) gon?, CB&Q beet hopper, CB&Q box

1. GN (BN)964806 Keokuk, IA 8/14/93

2. CB&Q 191091

3. CB&Q 36944 Denver 3/30/71

all my shots

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#1 looks like a side dump car. interesting.
#2 is also interesting with composite construction.

Ah, the composite side sugar beat hoppers. When the coal started to move BN just stopped hauling beats. Railroad clerks would say the sugar beat rush would pay for 100% of the Alliance division fixed costs. BN wanted to move coal, beats got in the way.

All those beat hoppers got tagged as rear end only cars and put into ballast service. It was not unusual to see the 55 ton cars loaded to the top chord with rock so they likely had 70-80 tons of load.

REO cars had to be in the rear 5 cars of any train unless the ENTIRE train was REO cars. This allowed for REO cars in locals and work trains or sugar beat locals. Some brain dead trainmaster decided they could use that exception to run unit ballast trains of 80 cars or so of 100% REO composite hoppers. Then they couldn't understand why the overloaded depression era cars were suffering frame and bolster failures and derailing trains. There were also derailments from head end REO cars which had 6000-8000 trailing tons behind and had the guts ripped right out of them especially on Angora Hill.

There was nothing wrong with the train make up the trainmasters would spout out, the Special Instructions say it is OK. It must be the engineer's train handling. Fire them all.

I guess they couldn't figure it out that the beets brought the higher paying refined sugar out of the factories

CB&Q 191091 composite hopper is interesting.
ALLEN

The refined sugar still came out of the beat plants as bags in boxcars and bulk hoppers. Sugar is a competitive bulk commodity where rail is the cheapest way to go.



WAF Wrote:
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> I guess they couldn't figure it out that the beets
> brought the higher paying refined sugar out of the
> factories