Nostalgia & History > Non-Unit Train Carloads in the 70s-80s

I've been re-watching some videos from the late 1970s and 80s recently and wondered where certain cars were going that we now think of as going in unit trains.

For example, one train might be a Conrail train with all sorts of freight cars and we might assume the various boxcars, covered hoppers, and tanks are heading to various industries. But what about the two randon autoracks? Or the three coal hoppers, spaced out as two hoppers, three boxcars, and another coal hopper? I would assume the 70s and 80s were too late for individual cars of coal going to small industries in local towns.

Curious. Thanks.

Interesting question -- how many customers
were getting single carloads of coal then.
Couldn't be extinct -- lots of places got
a car or two at a time circa 1950, and
they couldn't all have switched to oil heat?
How about industrial laundries and big
hospitals and other institutions with their
own heating plants?

(When they built the Equitable Building
at 120 Broadway in Manhattan circa 1915
-- largest office building in the world -- it had
its own coal-burning power plant. I've always
wondered how the coal got there.)



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/13/24 13:43 by timz.

Could also be repaired bad orders?
JB

Posted from Android

Good point too.

3rdswitch Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Could also be repaired bad orders?
> JB
>
> Posted from Android

still some coal in a few cars sometimes------i am talking now2024 in BNSF train to Denver---in older steel cars, export  ? met coal? not sure i ever found out

in the 70's 80's thou i would see tractors, grain in 40 footers, cooking oil.

along the cowboy line you would see stuff in tank cars for coops, grain cars,  stock cars in the early seventies,autos everything



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/14/24 12:55 by dan.

Repaired cars or maybe overloads that have been adjusted by removing some material.
CR

Posted from iPhone

I was at the University of Rochester in the late 70's. The power plant was coal fired and received a few carloads of coal that was delivered by Conrail. Used to be the LV before Conrail. Line is abandoned and the system became oil fired in the 90's.

Posted from Android

Lot of freight cars wound up on team tracks in small towns.  In the 1950's lumber, sheetrock, cement,  went to a lot of small towns. So did appliances, and automobiles  That traffic started a slow death in the late 1950's and by the late 1960's had almost disappeared.

Sometime around 1976 I came across some guys
in Springer, NM unloading a 60-ft? boxcar of lumber
by hand, plank by plank. Harder work than it looked.