Eastern Railroad Discussion > Tank Car in James River Removed

After 20 years, river-lodged railcar still proves a handful

Shannon Brennan
sbrennan@newsadvance.com
October 22, 2005

A railcar that has sat in the James River at Lynchburg, Virginia for 20 years was reluctant to leave its silty home Friday, but after seven hours of effort the car was tugged across the river and pulled to the bank.

“It’s out of the river,” said City Manager Kimball Payne. “Mission accomplished, but not completed.”

The railcar has been stuck alongside Percival’s Island near the Carter Glass Bridge since the Nov. 5, 1985, flood.

It’s now sitting under the bridge, just barely out of the water, where it will be cut in pieces for recycling. The car proved too heavy and unwieldy to haul up the bank.

Many people had complained about the eyesore for years, but more than a year ago members of the Greater Lynchburg Environmental Network (GLEN) and the city manager began conspiring to get the monstrously heavy car out of the river.

Several businesses and city departments volunteered to move the car, clear a space to pull it from and find it a home.

“The cooperation between city government, private contactors and environmental groups is excellent,” said Chuck Frederickson, riverkeeper for the Richmond-based James River Association. “It’s a great symbol for the initiative of Healthy Rivers.”

Four of the state’s largest river conservation groups, including the James River Association, launched an effort Thursday to lobby for a steady funding source to clean up the state’s waterways.

Frederickson said there’s a lot of junk like the railcar in the James, adding, “This is just one of the most obvious.”

The car proved tougher to move than expected, and several people speculated that the 40-foot railcar weighed more than an estimate of 20,000 pounds.

Glenn Trent volunteered the use of two wreckers to tow the railcar out, but the powerful trucks were no match for the railcar.

“I broke the main cable three times,” said Charles Brooks, who was driving the main wrecker, “along with a chain.”

Brooks said 20 to 30 tons of sand, along with the framework on the bottom of the railcar, were unexpected impediments.

“That all worked against us,” he said.

In the end, Counts & Dobyns Excavating Inc. had to bring in a bulldozer to help pull the car out.

The first impediment of the day was an old barge that had come to rest against the railcar on the Lynchburg side of the river. That had to be hauled out first, as it was blocking efforts to budge the railcar.

There was no lack of persistence among the crews working on the project. Four members of the Lynchburg Fire Department’s dive team spent hours in the cold water attaching and reattaching cables and chains.

“It was hard to drag because there are so many different snags,” said Phillip Meeks, one of the firefighters who found lack of footing and the cold the biggest problems for the dive team.

While the effort to move the railcar started about 8:30 a.m. Friday, the preparation actually took several months.

Daniel Bowman, a member of GLEN, tried to track down the owner of the car, but had no luck. He determined that the railcar, which proclaims it once held “Pure Sweet Molasses,” had floated down river from Buncher Railcar Service on Hydro Street.

The car was likely empty and off its wheels at the time of the flood, perhaps waiting to be scrapped, Bowman said.

Next the city had to determine whether there was anything in the car.

Despite rumors that it was filled with crystallized molasses, the firefighters’ dive team cut off one end of the tanker last spring, and found only river water and sand.

With one end removed, a good portion of the sand was flushed out.

Then there was the problem of where and how to get it out of the river.

Getting heavy equipment on Percival’s Island was out of the question, even though the railcar was closer to the island. The most logical place to pull it was on property owned by Ferbee Johnson Co. on the Concord Turnpike. Once the company agreed, the city streets division and Counts & Dobyns cleared the site.

Bowman also had to find someone to take the railcar. Cycle Systems Inc. agreed to recycle the steel, and proceeds from the recycling will now likely be used to reimburse Glen Trent for his broken cable, officials said.

When the car came to rest about 3:30 p.m., Donetia Brown of the city’s planning department tested the car for lead.

“It does have lead paint,” she said.

Payne said Cycle Systems would still be able to take the car, but needed that information to determine how to handle it.

David Robertson, a member of GLEN who promoted getting the car out of the river at a Department of Environmental Quality open house, said the idea really came from Rusty Painter, a former Lynchburg resident who was visiting his parents a few years ago and couldn’t believe the railcar was still there.

He wrote a letter to the editor asking why, and that got Robertson thinking.

“It’s really nobody’s responsibility,” he said of the railcar. “It’s everybody’s responsibility.”

On Friday, a lot of people proved him right.

Were the reporting marks visible anywhere on the car? Heck, they could have inquired with NS or CSX to find out who owned the car, using that information. Even if 20 years of river water had erased the painted marks, RR cars usually have metallic stamps - somewhere - showing a car's number. Something. They could have even posted that here on TO.com, and we could have found out, in no time, who owned it!

"Pure Sweet Molasses" is what was showing, according to the article in the newspaper, right? Maybe someone who knows what tankcar fleets have such heralds could look up the fleet in a 20-year-old ORER and see if any cars in their number-series are missing: that MIGHT be one way to find out.....

Can you see this from the road. If so where is it in relation to Sandy Hook yard? Might try to get some pics.

Gary

I wish someone, in the area, would take some pictures to post to this thread. It would be very interesting.
...Richard

>“I broke the main cable three times,” said Charles Brooks, who was driving the main wrecker<

I'm surprised someone wasn't injured when that cable parted ...

Don't suppose any TO types were there (with the obvious accessory :-)?

* JB *

I remember seeing some cars lettered "Pure Sweet Molasses" back in the days--they were probably GATX cars. In that case, there's no way to look up something like that in an Equipment Register.

I'm surprised that if the lettering showed up, a reporting mark and number weren't visible somewhere on the car--they're painted on the car in at least twice as many places as the lettering.

However, if this car floated down from a scrap yard, I'm pretty certain that the original owners have long since written it off.

Amazing it had been there that long! When I was working on the Chessie System Northern Region Rail Gang in April of 1986, we could see this tank car in the river from where our camp cars were parked.

That was just the following spring after the flood in question, there was much debris still evident all along the James River and most buildings still showed a water line on them. I thought that tank car would be removed along with all the other stuff we could see. But apparently not.

This flood was caused by a late-season hurricane that, while it was apparently not a significant storm on the coast where it had hit, dumped most its rain over the Virginia-West Virginia border well inland. I was working on a turnout-undercutting gang on the New River Sub. at Meadow Creek, WV when the storm hit. One of my union brothers on this gang lived along the Greenbrier River above Hinton and suffered severe damage to his home. Our gang kept working, however. We thought we would get pulled off to repair the tracks along the James River that had apparently washed out in places.

We were also parked next to the old C&O freight house in Lynchburg. Mud was caked 6 inches or more deep in it and most of the doors and windows were knocked out of it on the first floor. The building was all but abandoned before the flood so there was no hurry to clean it up. The upstairs was filled with papers from the era when "U.S.R.A Chesapeake and Ohio Division" was running the show during WW1. This building and several other old industrial/warehouse buildings around it burned to the ground the following summer after being struck by lightning.

CShaveRR Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I remember seeing some cars lettered "Pure Sweet
> Molasses" back in the days--they were probably
> GATX cars. In that case, there's no way to look
> up something like that in an Equipment Register.
>
> I'm surprised that if the lettering showed up, a
> reporting mark and number weren't visible
> somewhere on the car--they're painted on the car
> in at least twice as many places as the
> lettering.
>
> However, if this car floated down from a scrap
> yard, I'm pretty certain that the original owners
> have long since written it off.


You can trace a car, if you have reporting marks and a builder date. The ORER books are one way, if you can find a back-issue during the time a car you are looking for would likely have been in service. And, the Freight Car World Yahoo Group people would also likely have ways to discover what the car was.

Here's a website-posted photo of the car (I didn't take it, nor did I post it; I'm only providing a LINK for people to see it. The car's initials appear to have been blacked-over, but the number is there. It appears to be No. 623 or No. 633.) HERE:

http://photos.groups.yahoo.com/group/vrfe/vwp?.dir=/G.+R.+Harper&amp;.src=gr&amp;.dnm=Tank+Car+-+in+the+James+from+the+FLood+of+1985+++Box+672.jpg&amp;.view=t&amp;.done=http%3a//photos.groups.yahoo.com/group/vrfe/lst%3f%26.dir=/G.%2bR.%2bHarper%26.src=gr%26.view=t

The photo section is members only.

> Here's a website-posted photo of the car (I didn't
> take it, nor did I post it; I'm only providing a
> LINK for people to see it. The car's initials
> appear to have been blacked-over, but the number
> is there. It appears to be No. 623 or No. 633.)
> HERE:
>
> http://photos.groups.yahoo.com/group/vrfe/vwp?.dir
> =/G.+R.+Harper&.src=gr&.dnm=Tank+Car+-+in+
> the+James+from+the+FLood+of+1985+++Box+672.jpg&
> ;.view=t&.done=http%3a//photos.groups.yahoo.co
> m/group/vrfe/lst%3f%26.dir=/G.%2bR.%2bHarper%26.sr
> c=gr%26.view=t
>

Rhett, you oughta know that I know about Equipment Registers and such, and about the Freightcarworld folks!

I haven't been to Yahoo for a long time, and they apparently don't like my password any more. But if the number of the car was 633, and it was a very small domeless tank car, I suspect that the reporting mark was HOCX. I've seen the "Pure Sweet Molasses" cars in other HOCX series (I've never seen one of the 600-series cars). Was the car kind of yellowish in color? Another clue pointing toward HOCX (the infamous Head-On Collision Line!).

Carl