I am trying to find out what was used to transport grain in the 1920- 1935 time period. Did they have covered hoppers or was it all in box cars or refers? Thanks for your help.
I googled it and see that the doors are a bit different for a grain car, but how did they load and unload. I see small doors or hatches on the top of the larger doors but did these grain boxcars also have small doors down low? Was the hatch part of the normal door or at a corner of the car? Did they have any fills on top or on the ends of the grain cars? Thanks again Dan
The grain door blocked off all but a foot or so of space at the top of the boxcar's door opening; it allowed just enough room to fit in a nozzle or spout to load grain. When the car got to its destination, the door was typically torn open, allowing the grain to spill out. Unloading was finished by either workers with shovels and brooms, or a large mechanical shaker that Lownen posted a pic of. While there were a few boxcars built with grain service in mind - they had auxiliary grain doors high on their plug doors, obviating the need for the disposable grain doors - they didn't have any outlets on the bottoms. IIRC, BC Rail (or was it BN?) experimented with a boxcar with outlets and roof hatches, with the idea of a multi-purpose car that could be used as a boxcar one day, and a covered hopper the next, but it didn't pan out.
We've got them in HO, not sure about N - Walthers Model Railroad Mall -- product information page for 347-2000 Since all the prototypes were just basically heavy reinforced paper with some banding and printing on them, I don't see how one couldn't make them from scratch. Whip up some appropriate artwork, print it on some heavy paper, cut out, and glue into the door of an appropriate boxcar.:thumbs_up:
Yeah, don't confuse the two types of grain doors. The type you googled were not all that common. This picture shows a grain door on the car to the left: http://johnhill_3009.rrpicturearchives.net/showPicture.aspx?id=778502 Boxcars hauled grain using these paper doors at least into the 70's. I have read somewhere that at one time these doors were more substantial than heavy paper but were not being returned with the cars so they had to go with a cheaper alternative. Jason
The only boxcars I know of with hatches would have to be the ones that were converted to Kaolin clay service by ACL or SAL.
BN did have some box cars that had roof hatches. They ended up in hide service after covered hoppers took over the grain traffic. Boxcars used in grain service also had lines painted inside. They were at various heights for different grains to compensate for densities.
Paper Grain Doors Most grain doors were a composite of either heavy kraft board ( very thick paper - like 64 pt !)) laminated or nailed to wooden frames or were made of multiwall corrugated paper. Sometimes a coating or curtain coat wax was applied. ( think "box" making materials). These were cheaper than other alternatives, and could be disposed of easily. ( I have heard tale of people collecting the used grain doors and storing them for winter fuel for fireplaces and stoves as they were flamable with all that paper and grain dust !) Our plant in Winnipeg ( I work in the corrugated industry) used to make thousands of these during the winter and spring and ship then by rail around Western Canada.
Grain doors are offered by Mocalova Model Works, but their website appears to be offline (or they failed to renew their domain name.) Feather River Trains lists them as out of stock.
As a farmer that seems like a very ineficient way to move grain. But thinking back to when I was a boy and all the shoveling I did I guess maybe it was par for the day. I started out doing ear corn and then moving to shelled corn. Even now the use shovels and brooms to get the very last off the floors of the grain bins.
I thought that grain doors would be more of a post WWII usage, first using wood then the kraft-type cardboard. In the 1920's bulk items were mostly bagged in burlap sacks, so a boxcar load full of sacks would be more common. The grain door was used to eliminate the bagging. The first covered hoppers came out in the late 1930's but they were used in bulk cement service initally. Peter
I think what he was thinking of was MILW #1, the "bopper". Both CN and CP used 40' boxcars for branchline grain service until the mid-90s.