# What did coal gondolas look like?



## Hoytguy (Jan 7, 2018)

Hi guys. Ive been trying to figure out what the coal gondolas of the mid 1800s looked like.

Ive googled this but keep finding different answers. Maybe their were several different ones?


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## gregc (Apr 25, 2015)

i found these under


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## Hoytguy (Jan 7, 2018)

Ok ive found those and assumed because they're wood sides they would be correct. But i also keep finding steel sided ones as well as ones with large round cylinders on a flat bed

I cant find cars that look like those with wood sides. I went to a train show and looked through hundreds of rolling stock


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## gregc (Apr 25, 2015)

Hoytguy said:


> Ok ive found those and assumed because they're wood sides they would be correct. But i also keep finding steel sided ones as well as ones with large round cylinders on a flat bed
> 
> I cant find cars that look like those with wood sides. I went to a train show and looked through hundreds of rolling stock


the flat cars with large round cylinders are early tank cars.










hopper cars have doors underneath the car allowing the contents to be easily unloaded. it looks like there were early wooden hopper cars










wooden gondolas were used to haul coal before hoppers and must have been unloaded using manual labor and shovels.

after coal started be transported in hopper cars, there was still a need for gondolas, made from wood or metal.


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## Old_Hobo (Feb 20, 2014)

Hoytguy said:


> I cant find cars that look like those with wood sides. I went to a train show and looked through hundreds of rolling stock


Intermountain makes them.....

http://www.modeltrainforum.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=436281&stc=1&d=1523853083


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## wvgca (Jan 21, 2013)

tichy make coal / ore 28 foot hoppers for the 1890;s era


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## Hoytguy (Jan 7, 2018)

I guess i was hoping to find something that actually looked like real weathered wood . I'll have to figure something out


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## J.C. (Dec 24, 2016)

Hoytguy said:


> I guess i was hoping to find something that actually looked like real weathered wood . I'll have to figure something out


you could scratch them out of northeastern scale wood.


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## gregc (Apr 25, 2015)

Hoytguy said:


> I guess i was hoping to find something that actually looked like real weathered wood . I'll have to figure something out


here is is one attempt


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## Old_Hobo (Feb 20, 2014)

Link doesn't seem to work......


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## Vincent (Jan 28, 2018)

Hoytguy, I wonder if this isn't a situation where the factory manufactured flat cars, and then the railroads bought them and built them into gondolas.


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## wvgca (Jan 21, 2013)

Old_Hobo said:


> Link doesn't seem to work......


link works new ...
gregc edited the post early this am


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## gregc (Apr 25, 2015)

Old_Hobo said:


> Link doesn't seem to work......


extra http:// -- try it again


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## Old_Hobo (Feb 20, 2014)

Thank you, it sure does now......interesting weathering job.....but not what I would envision....


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## ebtnut (Mar 9, 2017)

Rolling stock in the mid-19th century was not too varied. Basically, you had box cars, flat cars, and gondolas, which were essentially flat cars with sides added. As the turn of the century approached, more specialized cars were developed. Gondolas intended for aggregate materials (coal, stone, iron ore, etc.) got doors on the bottom for easier and faster unloading. Greg's pic of the ET&WNC shows the drop-bottom doors hanging down. Eventually, slope sheets were designed to further expedite unloading. The early term for these cars was hopper-bottom gondolas, later shortend to just hoppers.


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## wvgca (Jan 21, 2013)

if it matters, to be reasonably accurate, the cars would need link and pin couplers for the 1850 time period ...
knuckle couplers as we know them were not invented yet ..
but your railroad. your rules


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## CTValleyRR (Jul 26, 2014)

ebtnut said:


> Rolling stock in the mid-19th century was not too varied. Basically, you had box cars, flat cars, and gondolas, which were essentially flat cars with sides added. As the turn of the century approached, more specialized cars were developed. Gondolas intended for aggregate materials (coal, stone, iron ore, etc.) got doors on the bottom for easier and faster unloading. Greg's pic of the ET&WNC shows the drop-bottom doors hanging down. Eventually, slope sheets were designed to further expedite unloading. The early term for these cars was hopper-bottom gondolas, later shortend to just hoppers.


Not to nit pick, but I'd spin this just a little differently. There weren't many STANDARD types in the mid-19th century, but you had lots of home grown varieties, based on local needs. When the CP & UP were building the original Transcon through Utah and Nevada, they created water cars by fastening big vats to flatcars.


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## Diesel Fuel (Apr 10, 2018)

I think I have seen pictures of old wood sided ore type cars where the side folded down somehow and the load must have just slid out the side onto the ground


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## Shdwdrgn (Dec 23, 2014)

Diesel Fuel said:


> I think I have seen pictures of old wood sided ore type cars where the side folded down somehow and the load must have just slid out the side onto the ground


Have you ever seen pics of how they used to load grain into boxcars? They'd put planks across the doorways and slowly fill it up, then when they went to unload they would pull out one plank at a time and shovel the grain towards the door.


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## Diesel Fuel (Apr 10, 2018)

Shdwdrgn said:


> Diesel Fuel said:
> 
> 
> > I think I have seen pictures of old wood sided ore type cars where the side folded down somehow and the load must have just slid out the side onto the ground
> ...


I haven't seen that. That would be the good old days when labor was cheap! It would take a lot of shoveling to get the ends of the car shoveled out, it might have been 5 feet deep at the ends


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## wvgca (Jan 21, 2013)

Diesel Fuel said:


> I haven't seen that. That would be the good old days when labor was cheap! It would take a lot of shoveling to get the ends of the car shoveled out, it might have been 5 feet deep at the ends


It was the same depth right through .. before it got too small, a shoveler would go inside and level the load, a car could hold more easily but there was nowhere to put it ..


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## J.C. (Dec 24, 2016)

grain in box cars was not always done by hand as photos show what was called a power shovel was used to unload also if you note the long sock on loading tube so ends of cars could be loaded first also on one you can see the plank going into car.


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## Shdwdrgn (Dec 23, 2014)

Ah very nice photos! And I'm really surprised to see some newer cars there (judging by the trucks), since I thought grain hoppers started being produced around the same time that arch-bar trucks went away.

I just have to wonder what it would take to model actually loading and unloading some fine sand (to represent the grain) into a box car. Maybe set up an inner door to represent the planks which slide into place across the open doorway. Add a sloped floor out of site from the ends of the car and it just might work.


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## ebtnut (Mar 9, 2017)

Covered grain hoppers really didn't become prevalent until the 1950's. In the steam era covered hoppers were primarily limited to loadings such as cement and sand.


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## Shdwdrgn (Dec 23, 2014)

ebtnut said:


> Covered grain hoppers really didn't become prevalent until the 1950's. In the steam era covered hoppers were primarily limited to loadings such as cement and sand.


Really? I thought I had read that grain hoppers started appearing in the teens or twenties. You would have thought carrying grain in a covered hopper would have been obvious.


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## J.C. (Dec 24, 2016)

the photos are ww2 era , but I remember in the late 50's seeing box cars being loaded at a small elevator were I grew up.
found some interesting statistics about the CN box cars dedicated to grain hauling in 1965 they had 11,000 in 1985 they had 3,160 left in 1996 none.


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## Old_Hobo (Feb 20, 2014)

Shdwdrgn said:


> Ah very nice photos! And I'm really surprised to see some newer cars there (judging by the trucks), since I thought grain hoppers started being produced around the same time that arch-bar trucks went away


I do believe those are Andrews trucks, and not arch-bars....


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## CTValleyRR (Jul 26, 2014)

Shdwdrgn said:


> Really? I thought I had read that grain hoppers started appearing in the teens or twenties. You would have thought carrying grain in a covered hopper would have been obvious.


The "appearance" of a car -- the first ones being manufactured and / or delivered to railroads -- doesn't mean all grain was instantaneously carried in them. At the very least, there would be a gradual introduction due to production capacity. Even more importantly, railroads are notoriously stingy, and it would be normal for them to purchase cars in small lots as they budgeted for it (often as the cars currently used in that capacity reached the end of their service life), not to replace their entire grain-carrying fleet in one fell swoop.


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## Old_Hobo (Feb 20, 2014)

CTValleyRR said:


> Even more importantly, railroads are notoriously stingy


Now *THERE* is an absolute truth! Some would say cheap instead of stingy, but......:laugh:


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## cv_acr (Oct 28, 2011)

It also depends on how the customers are set up to load/unload cars. Many older elevators would not have been set up to handle hopper cars.

Grain was loaded into regular boxcars well into the 1980s in some places.


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## cv_acr (Oct 28, 2011)

Also, the earliest covered hopper cars tended to be considered rather specialized equipment and were likely than not to be used for cement or dry bulk chemicals. Grain was considered clean loading and didn't contaminate or wear out a regular boxcar.


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## riogrande (Apr 28, 2012)

D&RGW used general service drop bottom gondola's for coal until they began getting 3-bay coal hoppers in the 1950's in numbers. They continued to use the drop bottom gondolas into the early 1980's. I've seen photo's of them in freight trains in the 1970's and they were used on the runs carrying lime stone out of the Monarch Branch down to the Pueblo blast furnaces.


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## LateStarter (Mar 12, 2016)

In my 100-car coal drag, (mostly triple hoppers) I have several of these...
Circa 1956 (InterMountain).


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## Old_Hobo (Feb 20, 2014)

Very nice!


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## LateStarter (Mar 12, 2016)

Also got a few each of these.
InterMountain issued them each in six different road numbers.

Coal in some. Others carry coke or limestone.
_They break up the visual monotony of a hopper drag dramatically._


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## riogrande (Apr 28, 2012)

I have 10 or the D&RGW version of the IMRC drop bottom gondola's pictured above. Six of them I picked up at a train show at $12.50 each. The last four are from the latest run just arriving at dealers in the past few weeks.

They were used to haul coal early in their lives and were also used on the limestone runs from the Monarch Branch up until that operation shut down around 1983/83. I'm modeling late 1970's thru early 1980's so they work for me.


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## LateStarter (Mar 12, 2016)

riogrande said:


> I have 10 or the D&RGW version of the IMRC drop bottom gondola's pictured above.


I've grabbed as many D&RGW cars as I could for the coal drag...
Accurail, ExactRail, Bachman, Stewart, Atlas, etc.

When these gons came out, I immediately looked for them in D&RGW, but I haven't seen a single one yet.
TrainLife has the other roads, but no dice on the Rio Grande. I guess supply is regional.
I've got 'first dibs' in at the LHS.


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## riogrande (Apr 28, 2012)

LateStarter said:


> I've grabbed as many D&RGW cars as I could for the coal drag...
> Accurail, ExactRail, Bachman, Stewart, Atlas, etc.
> 
> When these gons came out, I immediately looked for them in D&RGW, but I haven't seen a single one yet.
> ...


If you purchase online, region is moot. I bought mine at MB Kline (modeltrainstuff). They had D&RGW in stock for about a week before all numbers sold out, but you do have to watch for them when they come in if it's a popular road name, like D&RGW tends to be.

I see some still on Ebay if you are still looking. I've noticed some road names for IMRC sell out pretty fast after they hit this side of the pond; after that it's a treasure hunt or troll Ebay.

I don't need alot of the drop bottom gons because by the late 1970's there weren't a lot left in regular service.


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## ogaugenut (Dec 27, 2012)

Side dumping coal gondola:


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