Building a WWII ATSF Fleet VII Freight Car Fleet, the USRA 40’ Double Sheathed Box Car – Gilbert-Nelson results from the Jan 45 ORER

I’ve been working with the January 1945 Official Railway Equipment Register to come up with realistic numbers of representative freight cars for my California based railroad during the latter part of World War II.  I’ve been converting the image files on the Westerfield CD to a PDF and have been building an index/table of contents.  I am going a step further though, and compiling a listing of the car types operated by each railroad and private operator.  I finished the RR portion and came up with a total of 1,968,421 US railroad owned cars, excluding passenger, MOW and cabooses.  Canadian and Mexican roads are included in this total. 

I have yet to compile the data on the private car owners, which includes the refrigerators of PFE, FGE, etc.  Nor does it include the box cars of the private lines.  But it does give a basis for comparison of the box car fleets of my modeled era. 

Having read Tony Thompson and Charles Hostetler’s blogs and their posts on the Gilbert-Nelson freight car distribution, I wanted to see if I could figure out how many and which roads’ USRA Double Sheathed cars were active at the end of 1944.  My first thought was to start with the original owners, and somewhere on my hard drive I have photos of the article published in one of the historical journals that listed the proposed and actual USRA production and distribution.  I really need to get better organized, as I have not yet combined them into a usable PDF and I didn’t remember some of my other references.  Well, Google is my friend, (and yours too), and a search for “USRA double sheathed boxcar” led me to a page on Eric Hansmann’s blog, http://designbuildop.hansmanns.org/a-guide-to-1920s-era-ho-scale-plastic-freight-cars/, that reminded me of the Railway Prototype Cyclopedia on my reference book shelf.

I don’t have all of them, as I came late to the game, but they are fantastic goldmines of data.  Using the table provided on pages 50 and 51 of Volume 16, I searched through my index to locate the owner’s Jan 45 entries in the ORER.  With that info in hand, I constructed the following table of surviving cars for my era:

USRA Double Sheathed Cars
Railroad	Series			Qty	Notes
ACL	43735	-	44234	493	Class 0-15 Ventilator
B&M	70000	-	70499	486
CB&Q	120500	-	120999	479
CRI&P	155000	-	157499	1669
CStPM&O	36100	-	37098	84	Even Nos Only
DL&W	44000	-	44799	431
DSS&A	16000	-	16049	49	Ex PM
GN	23494	-	24993	1450
GTW	465000	-	456249	185
KCS	15500	-	15599	94
M&StL	22000	-	22598	292	Even Nos Only
M&StL	25000	-	25898	393	Even Nos Only
M&StL	51000	-	51398	197	Even Nos Only
M&StL			Total	882
MP	45001	-	45250	230
NWP	1900	-	1999	100
CCC&StL	56784	-	56974	2	NYC Lot 402-B
NYC	234700	-	234945	242	Lot 386-B
NYC	278000	-	278999	667	Lots 394-B and 404-B
NYC	290000	-	290999	964	Lots 382-B, 395-B and 402-B
NYC			Total	1875
PM	80000	-	80499	1	XAB Double Door Auto Car
PM	80500	-	81999	4
PM			Total	5
SL-SF	127000	-	130499	1035	57 cars differ in dimensions, shares series with 2450+ steel rebuilds
SP&S	10000	-	10299	293
TH&B	4500	-	4799	297	(Canadian)
WAB	78200	-	80999	2635
				12772	Total Active Jan 45 ORER
				12279	Total USRA XM Jan 45 ORER
				12475	US owned USRA cars

Several interesting points about this data:  The total number of USRA cars is approximately equal to the number of Ventilator or 50’ plain box cars in 1945, 12772 USRA, 12729 Ventilator, 13678 50’ plain box.  So if Nelson-Gilbert holds true, any late WWII modeler should have approximately equal numbers of 40’ USRA DS, 50’ single door box, and ventilator cars on the layout.  Right now, I have two 50’ SD box and no Vents.  I plan for a couple more home road 50’rs to fill in my missing Santa Fe classes, but didn’t have plans for any Vents.  I may have to invest in a few of the Westerfield vent kits.  The other thing that this reminded me of, is that the nice Bx-2 I picked up at an estate sale either needs to go to a new home, get re-lettered for one of the above owners, or kept as a known anachronism.  I could explain it as the roving car inspector found it hidden behind the shop on the XYZ RR in east Timbuktu. . .

NARA SAN FRANCISCO REVISITED

Living in the Bay area five years ago while recovering from surgery, I made several pilgrimages across the Golden Gate to the National Archives Regional Center in San Bruno.  Even without the pressure of having to get back to work, there still wasn’t enough time to dig in to all that the Archives hold for the modeler/historian.  Now that I’m working again, I’m expected to show up and produce, leaving less time for pursuit of the hobby.  Tony Thompson’s recent post on mainline freights elicited a comment from me on the header of his Santa Fe perishable freight waybill.  Tony used a version for the ATSF Railway with accounting code 22, while I contended that for a shipment originating in southern California, it should have been on an ATSF Coast Lines, code 30 bill.  (You can read Tony’s post and our on-line discussion at: http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2017/10/the-role-of-mainline-trains-on-branch.html#comment-form)  We ran in to each other at the Chicagoland RPM last week and had a good discussion of Santa Fe waybilling practice that neither of us can definitively characterize without physical or photographic evidence of actual Santa Fe waybills.  For a company so large and long lived, there are a dearth of examples and I implore those who may have such samples to share with the rest of the community. 

What does this waybill discussion have to do with NARA?  Well, the treasure trove of information gathered has sat, not fully analyzed since shortly after capture on my trusty Canon 30D and storage on multiple hard drives.  The discussion with Tony and his request for a copy of a Coast Lines waybill led to me digging into the files to see what’s there.  One of the reasons for the shelving of the deep dive was the early discovery that what the Archives had listed as “Waybills” were actually memoranda copies of the original “Bills of Lading” for many tank car shipments followed by the Office of Defense Transportation.  The bad news is documents in this form did NOT travel with the car, that document was the “Waybill” which had a different format and header.  The good news is that there is even more applicable information than I first thought on these Bills of Lading.  I knew that the ones in the ODT files at NARA SF had the car numbers, shipper, consignee and lading.  What I didn’t realize five years ago that I discovered this morning is that for the loaded cars, they also had examples of weight agreement stamps and gallonage of the cars that were loaded to full visual capacity.  All of them, empty or loaded, included the car routing.

 The 19 Santa Fe examples cataloged so far have only been for empties returning after delivering sunflower seed oil for export to the Russians through the Dorward & Sons storage tanks on the Richmond Belt in January 1945.  This is good news in a way, as the interchange to the RB comes off the east end of the Richmond yard, something that will be on my layout and I model that month.  The not quite great news is that of those 19 cars, 17 are MPLX and I only have one, a 10K Proto 2000 Type 21, and the cars were a mix of 8 and 10K gallon cars.  Here is an example:

A more interesting example is a later shipment of coconut oil from Oakland to Ohio.  Both WP and SP originated parts of that traffic.  Here is an example of a WP BoL:

And because ODT was redirecting tank cars where they were needed to support the war effort, what follows is an example of one of the world’s shortest return hauls: 

Note that these memorandum copies are not all on the pre-printed memorandum sheet, normally sheet three, with sheet two being the Shipper’s Order copy.  Some examples in the files have the inapplicable pre-printed title struck out and replaced by a stamped “Memorandum.”  Also note that the SP bill is on a “Collect On Delivery” pre-printed form.  The WP form has a weight agreement stamp and the weights entered for the Eldorado Terminal originated loads of crude coconut oil are about 7.5 times the listed capacity of the car in gallons.  I suspect that the companion waybill was in-fact a transit waybill from the notation about storage & refining in transit in the lower left of the item description. 

Although these examples are not the “Holy Grail” of actual WWII era waybills, they do contain most, if not all the information needed to complete one, at least at the origin.  Sorting through the images made that day, I have info on 111 tank car movements in the Bay Area near the end of WWII.  In a couple cases, cars moved from San Francisco to Oakland on one Bill, then were forwarded east several days later on a different Bill.  One has to take care to not read too much into this info though, as the records that made it into the permanent files are the ones that took additional attention.  Not there is the day-to-day flow of feed stock in and product out of the refineries or chemical plants.  Occasionally we see AvGas or asphalt shipments, like some of the latter to a station in Washington state named Hanford earlier in the war.  But those needed attention in the massive freight flow to make sure they did not delay critical war work.  Looking back, I understand why someone thought a paving project in the middle of nowhere should have that kind of support and attention, but I doubt that it was understood by most of the participants at the time.  I hope this and my other posts help you understand how things were done back then.  I’ve been having fun researching the history and recreating it in HO scale.

I will repeat my request for Santa Fe waybills, especially from the Coast Lines during WWII, but examples are needed from all four operating companies: ATSF, ATSF Coast Lines, GCSF and P&SF.  I welcome comments here or at NorthBayLines@att.net

John Barry

Lovettsville, VA

5 November 2017

MAY 8, 1945 GERMANY DEFEATED!

Congratulations to our boys in Europe who have completed the destruction of Hitler and the Nazi menace.  Today is a day to celebrate that victory, but we must not forget the war is only half over as Tojo and his Imperial forces fight on in the Pacific.  As heavy as the increased war traffic has been on the North Bay Lines, we can expect it to get even heavier as our victorious forces pivot to Asia to bring their American steel into the battle against Japan. 

The management and employees of the North Bay Lines are expanding our physical plant to handle the additional traffic and continue to provide the highest level of service to our boys deploying through Camp Stoneman and the San Francisco Port of Embarkation.  

Two dictators down, one to go!

John Barry

ATSF North Bay Lines 

Golden Gates & Fast Freights 

Lovettsville, VA

A Visit to the National Archives

A great deal of information pertinent to my modeling efforts is preserved in the National Archives in College Park Maryland.  The Archives are a pleasant place to do research, but it does take a bit of preparation.

Archives II, College Park, MD

Some of the finding aids are available on-line, but most of the more useful aids are only available in the research rooms.  You need to have a current researcher card to gain access to the research floors, so plan ahead to spend some extra time on you first day checking in and getting registered.  Textual, photographic and cartographic records are on separate floors, so if you need to access all three, plan on a multi-day visit.  And although you can look at records on most Saturdays, you have to have them “pulled” during the work week, so weekend only visits are only good for figuring out what you want to look at when you can come back during the week.  If you are going to look at military files, as I have been doing, get familiar with the Army and Navy file plans for your time frame, available on line.  And they did change how they organized things over time, so reference to the contemporary master file plan really helps determine where to look. 

Don’t bring a hand-held scanner, you won’t be allowed to use it.  Do bring a good digital camera it makes a very good “DAD” (Data Acquisition Device).  I have been using my Canon 30D with a 28-135 lens on a tripod with remote shutter release.  You can hand hold, but that gets tiresome.  Ask me how I know.  Your newer smart phone can also work, as can your tablet.  I have copied the finding aid for the Office of the Chief of Transportation with my Kindle Fire.  I now have a copy that I can refer to while commuting. 

In my last visit on 27 and 28 May, I finally found some information on MAIN trains and Military Extras.  The MAIN train information came from formerly classified messages from the traffic control division of the Army’s Office of the Chief of Transportation, Record Group 336.  When working with any records, FOLLOW THE RULES!  This goes triple for formerly classified records.  Make sure that the declassification slip and the project number are visible in ALL copies and photos you make of any item that is in a record box that has ANY formerly classified records in it.  Most of the WWII records retain their original classification markings and were declassified in bulk.  Without the numbers from the slip, you will have a very hard time proving that the Secret document on your hard drive isn’t any more.  Having your hard drive confiscated is not something that you want to deal with. 

And here are a couple examples of what is there you can click to enlarge:

This message is addressed to the Commanding General (C.G) Ninth Service Command (CMD), Army Service Forces (ASF), Fort (FT) Douglas, Utah and to the San Francisco Port of Embarkation (SFPE), California

The above reads: Military impedimenta (IMPED) from Camp (CP) Gruber, OK to Oakland, CA SFPE 1 box car, to Emeryville, CA SFPE 15 flat cars.  Both routed via Missouri Pacific, Denver Rio Grande Western, Southern Pacific.  Leave (LV) to arrive (ARR) January 9^th.  Freight Route Order Military (MI) 6061 code 1190

Here’s one that I’ll need for Camp Stoneman:

7 Officers, 195 Enlisted Men arriving Camp Stoneman, CA from Wilken, NC on 16 January.  Consist of NEC (Necessary) Tourist cars, 1 Baggage (BAG) and one Troop Kitchen (TC). Routed Southern, Frisco, Santa Fe!  How many Tourist cars were necessary?  Army policy was to not have two enlisted in an upper, so the capacity of a section was two EM in the lower and 1 in the upper.  With 195 enlisted, that meant at least 65 sections.  Officers usually travelled in standard Pullmans, but apparently not in this case.  They did not have to share a berth though, so a max of two per section for 4-7 more or 69 to 72 total sections for the troops in this move.  To that, each sleeper also carried its Pullman porter and I think each train also carried a Pullman conductor, but I am not certain.  To accommodate all the troops and the Pullman personnel, would take at least six 13 section tourist cars.  If Pullman were able to provide four 16 section cars plus another of any capacity, they could have reduced the number of cars by one.  This is a good modelable MAIN train for me with a baggage car, three 13s, Troop Kitchen, three more 13s.  Time to get cracking on building those Branchline 12-1s as 13s tourist cars with Tom Madden’s non-AC roofs.

JOHN BARRY

30 May, 2016

Arlington, VA

Memorial Day 2016

Remembering those who gave their all. 

I had the privilege today to be present at the 148^th Memorial Ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery.  I have visited a couple times in the distant past, but today was the first time that I attended a formal Memorial Day Ceremony.  There was quite a line to get in through security, though it moved quickly. (TSA, you could learn something from the Secret Service and the Army) 

  

The gentleman behind me was complaining to his wife that the line was so long and that the uniformed service members were also waiting in the same line.  Maybe I should have shared my thoughts: “A long line for today’s ceremony means that the people care enough to honor those who did lay down their lives for our country.”  And “Our service men are citizens too.” 

And they kept coming, this view is just as I got to security, the line is no shorter than when I started.

Part of the Presidential security detail getting into position.

But it wasn’t just Americans who came to pay their respects today.  A group of Germans were not too far ahead of me in line and ended up across the aisle at the ceremony. 

And they too, rendered honors at the playing of Taps.

The VFW was well represented in the color parties.

I heard my first live 21 gun salute during the arrival of the official party.  All of the speakers spoke well and gave respectful honors to those who gave their lives for their country.

The invocation.

Retiring the colors.

After the ceremony I visited the Tomb of the Unknowns.

Exiting the amphitheater, I came across a pair of group headstones that have special meaning to me.  I learned of both sets of deaths on the flight deck of a C-130 while prepping for a training mission.  The first, in 1980, was the calamity at Desert One while attempting to rescue the hostages from Iran.  That event inspired me to volunteer for Special Ops flying.  I didn’t know any of the men involved personally, but they did have an impact on my career.

The second incident memorialized here really hit me in the gut.  I was prepping for my first flight in the C-130A at Wright-Patt when my instructor came out late and said the Space Shuttle just blew up.  Frank said it so nonchalantly; we all thought he was kidding to explain his tardiness.  Only after we returned from the flight and saw that endless loop of the video of the explosion, did the reality set in.  I lost two people that I did know.  The Commander, Dick Scobee, was the son of my Air Force Academy Liaison Officer.

Ellison Onizuka had taken time out of his schedule as an instructor at the USAF Test Pilot School in the summer of ’77 to teach a young cadet how to operate and program the HP calculators that they were using for data analysis. 

That young cadet was me.

Today was a moving day for me.  One where I recalled the memories of many comrades who are no longer with us like Tony, one of my loadmasters, killed in the LAPES demonstration crash of 1987 or my classmate, Gary, whose parents told him he couldn’t come home if he quit the Academy.  Gary went home in a box.  They live on in my memories as do the thousands of others living in the memories of their comrades, friends, and loved ones.

Never Forget.

John C. Barry, Major, USAF (Ret)

Accurail’s new 36’ box car

Eric Hansmann has posted another installment of prototype information for Accurail’s forthcoming 36 foot box car kits on his Design, Build, Op blog. (http://designbuildop.hansmanns.org/accurail-prototype-data/)

 Ray Breyer has done a great job again with a summary of prototypes for the 1400 series straight sill version with metal ends.  Ray gives some information as to how many cars of a given prototype survived at certain dates.  That is very helpful for determining how many of a given road name existed at that point in time.  But it doesn’t tell you about the rest of the fleet and how likely it would be to see any short box cars at that point.  My recent work on the January 1945 Official Railway Equipment Register (you can read about it here: http://northbaylines.blogspot.com/2016/03/building-wwii-atsf-fleet-vi-gilbert.html) gives a ready reference to how common the less than 40 foot car was.

Source: Jan 45 ORER

US XM less than 40':   57,917

NA XM less than 40': 119,727

Total US cars all types: 2,049,963          2.8%

Total North America:     2,236,560          5.4%

Total US Box, Auto & Vent:  742,117     7.8%

Total NA Box, Auto & Vent:  867,504   13.8%

Total US Box & Auto: 729,388                7.9%  

Total US Box & Auto: 845,775              14.0%

Total US Box: 614,603                            9.4%

Total NA Box: 735,724                          16.3%

The US fleet at the beginning of the last year of WWII was nearly 10% of the XM box cars registered in the ORER. 

The number of short auto cars was much lower, 1642 of 113,11 US auto cars, or 1.5%.

The total short XM and XA percentage was 8.2% of the US and 14.2% of the North American the Box and Auto fleet.  The percentage of short house cars should be larger also, but I don’t have a summary of ventilator car lengths, only the VA totals.  A significant portion was less than 40 feet though.

The pending K brake interchange ban, availability of steel for post war car construction, and the condition of a lot of these older, smaller capacity cars led to the rapid retirement of most of them in the period after WWII.  That said, a number of them soldiered on into the 60’s, so this is a very useful series of models to bring needed diversity to your transition era and earlier model fleets.

JOHN BARRY

Washington DC

9 April 2016

Follow the Money

That old saw for finding out what really goes on applies to the railroad you are modeling too!

Santa Fe gross earnings for 1943

1        $94,493,000      Los Angeles Area

2        $81,550,000      San Francisco Bay Area

5        $22,231,665      McCune NM (Fort Wingate Ammunition Depot)

10      $17,738,121      Bellemont AZ (Ammunition Depot)

Two of the top ten revenue producers for 43 were isolated stations in the middle of no where on the Albuquerque Division.  Both stations moved up in the 44 rankings: McCune to 3rd with $29,561,035 and Bellemont to 9th with $23,414,024.  I don’t have the corresponding numbers for the metropolitan areas though.  The tariff for explosives and charges for dedicated trains must have been quite lucrative to boost these two locations into the top tier.

This partial information only whets my appetite to dig deeper into how the RR made its money and could afford all the cool locomotives and cars that we love to model.  Santa Fe, like its competitors, was in business to make money. You can see evidence of that in their internal histories with lots of ink devoted to revenue sources, traffic density, infrastructure improvements and growth potential. 

We have wonderful modeling resources in the form of conductor trip books, dispatcher train sheets and station records of trains.  But those are very hard to find because they only indirectly affected the revenue of the RR.  Those operations oriented documents may have provided source data for the accounting department, but the bean counters didn’t care that the NEX arrived in Stockton with 67 cars and departed with 59.  They cared that in 1943 at Stockton, ATSF originated 4616 carloads; terminated 9888; received 30,471 from WP, 19,514 from SP, and 1934 from CCT; forwarded 22,685 to WP, 14,799 to SP, and 362 to CCT along with how much revenue those cars made.

Perhaps a different line of inquiry to the various archives is in order.  One that pursues the financials and how the traffic paid off for the share holders and charged the public.  The good news is that some of this information was mandated by government to assist in setting rates and shows up in annual reports to the ICC and state regulators.  The railroads had to aggregate the data to compile the information in the reports.  The ICC reports had required information about commodities handled, the states got similar reports that included only data for their state.  That data had to be sortable to provide those state reports.  RR internal histories showed selected data by station.  What if we could find the accounting documents that were the basis for these summaries? 

Time for me to figure out which forms to look for.  Fortunately for me and my fellow Santa Fe modelers, ATSF was a very organized bureaucracy that wanted its employees to use the right paperwork and get the right form.  Two years ago I reached out to the Santa Fe community to find the form index.  Every bureaucratic organization needs one if they use forms.  And before computers and spreadsheets, paper forms were the way things got done.  Thanks to John Moore of Albuquerque who loaned me his 1947 and 1948 editions, I was able to scan them and provide them to the Santa Fe Historical and Modeling Society for the use of modelers and rail historians.  You can find the 1947 edition at http://www.atsfrr.com/resources/BarryJohn/47%20Form%201091%20Std%20Form%20Index.pdf

And the 1958 edition at http://www.atsfrr.com/resources/BarryJohn/58%20Form%201091%20Std%20Form%20Index.pdf

Someone else provided a 1927 edition. http://www.atsfrr.com/resources/Forms/1091%201927.pdf

And I recently found a 1975 edition that I purchased from eBay for our more modern modelers

http://www.atsfrr.com/resources/Forms/Form%201091%20Std%201975%20opt.pdf

These indices tell you the title and number of the form.  They are arranged by department, so you can find the report of locomotives assigned and cars repaired in the Mechanical Department section and the waybill and report of cars interchanged forms in the Accounting Department section.  Knowing what forms to look for helps your archivist or reference librarian find them by number or title.  Having the correct title helps, a lot.  Ask me how I know.

Other roads almost certainly have equivalent information.  If you model another road, work with your historical society to find and share this kind of information.  We all benefit from better access to information.

The bottom line is that what affected the RR’s bottom line is what got managed, recorded, and saved.  When you find your golden nuggets, please share them!

John Barry,

Washington DC

2 April 2016