Passenger Trains > What happened to UP biz car 108?

In the late 1990's, this nice UP platform-observation business car showed up on a UP company-service flat car at Great Western Railway in Loveland, CO. The trucks for the car, which was completely stripped inside, arrived on a separate flat car. It disappeared and was rumored to be stored inside a building at GWR off of its trucks. But several years ago, the building was left open and there was no sign of anything like this being stored inside. Some information says it was sold to Mexico in 1987, but that was several years before this photo, and this was in Colorado USA. So the question is, where did this attractive car go, does anybody know what happened to it? === === = === JLH



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/22/17 15:55 by highgreengraphics.

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Looks like a cheaper fix than adding roller bearing trucks, just ride round like this. That's what shoulda been done with the CB&Q business car #96 at the Colorado Railroad Museum. An open platform is too good to go to waste just sitting.

Ed



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/22/17 17:08 by Auburn_Ed.

How far apart in make up is the 106 from the 108. Photo taken in the late 60s. It looks like the 108 has been rebuilt at least once.

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Yeah, I know about 106, that's now "Shoshone", if nothing else the windows on 108 are modernized. === === = === JLH

The UP Business Car book by Barger, says it was renumbered to 102 before being sold in 1986.
Apparently the number was never applied to the car.
If this is the right car, it was originally Oregon, Washington RR & Navigation 185 built in 1912!

they threw it on idler trucks for awhile

This car was before my time at U.P. However when I first started doing their Amtrak inspections ( mid '90s ) there was one biz car body on a flat that was sold. It went to Arizona and is now named "Promontory Point". There was another sold the same way '87-88ish. It was an xGM&O car that was bought from Jim Green's Texas Tank Car Works to upgrade & add to the fleet. It was numbered UP 125. This was sold off around the time of the Mexico sale and it currently sits in pretty bad shape on the former F&EV RR in Hooper NE. I wouldn't be surprised if the 108 and 125 were sold at about the same time.

The next question is going to be why are they all truck-less. That's easy. Everything sold was on U.P. outside Swinghanger disc brake trucks and until the baggage cars started coming out of MOW service we didn't have many spares. They now had the CNW cars, just bought the 4 Scenic Rail Dining / Transcisco cars and recently added 4 more Domes to the fleet. All needed to be retrucked to fit into the mechanical scheme of things. The original UP cars on the list below used the 6 1/2 x 12 bearing dome trucks and were retrucked with 6 x 11.

Cars involved - Lake Forest, Lake Bluff, Fox River, City of San Francisco, Colorado Eagle, Walter Dean, City of Portland, Challenger.
Columbine & Missouri River Eagle are omitted as they were built with 6 x 11 trucks.

That is a sudden need for a lot of trucks considering you just sold 1/2 of your fleet just a few years before.

Thanks for the additional info. Come to think of it, I do not recall if I actually SAW the trucks on another flat car, or if somebody just told me they thought so, so it could be that there were no trucks for this. Again, I was told it was in a building without trucks, but at some point it disappeared and I wondered if it is still around somewhere. === === = === JLH

it didn't become someones cabin? pete asher?



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/24/17 00:23 by dan.

Speaking of the Shoshone, it is spending tonight in San Luis Obispo as part of the engineering special that has been running around California the past few days.

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I don't know if it is a cabin, either. Wanted to know if anybody on here knew anything. === === = === JLH