When did shipping grain in covered hoppers begin?

[gfisher]

I am working on a transition era route, late 40's early 50's, and have a grain facility. Were they still shipping grain in boxcars at that time, or had they begun to use covered hoppers? There are some nice 40ft covered hoppers in Trainz but I don't know if they are of the correct period.

 

[JCitron]

Hi George,

I did some poking around on this as it piqued my curious mind...

From what I was told, my late uncle and his brothers used to unload grain at the grain elevators in Halifax, NS back in the early 1960s. The CN was using boxcars then and was was still shipping grain in boxcars as late as the early 1990s due light tracks on some of the older granger lines.

http://tracksidetreasure.blogspot.com/2009/02/cn-grain-boxcars.html

You might find this interesting too... A bit below the heading, in a rather long post, is mention of boxcars being used in the US in the 1970s.

http://www.trainsim.com/vbts/showthread.php?271751-How-is-Grain-loaded-from-Elevator-to-train

So, you using boxcars is fine as that continued right through the 1970s in the US and 1990s in Canada.

Hope this helps...

John

 

[bdaneal]

According to Kline and Culotta in The Postwar Freight Car Fleet, the vast majority of covered hoppers in the 1930s and 1940s were used to ship cement. As an interesting bit of statistical trivia included in the book, covered hoppers represented less than one percent of the total US freight fleet in 1948, so even the cement covered hoppers were uncommon. The book generally cuts off at about 1950, and there are no mentions of covered hoppers used for grain in that era. I think grain was shipped in boxcars exclusively until the advent of larger 3-bay covered hoppers in the late 1950s made it economically feasible to ship grain by hopper.

Cheers,
Ben

 

[gfisher]

Thanks guys. I knew that the boxcars were in use until quite recently, but I wasn't sure about the hoppers. Looks like the transition began in the late fifties to early sixties to the use of covered hoppers, so it looks like I will stick with boxcars.

 

[rgcx]

By the mid 60's; US grain loadings in covered hoppers took off. However grain boxcars (40ft) continued until the early 1980s as many branchlines couldn't handles 100 ton hoppers. Railroads quickly began to freely abandon these branch lines; rather than spending $ to upgrade branchlines. Before the Staggers Act; the ICC was very heavy handed in regulating tariffs and denying mergers and abandonments.

 

[whitepass]

If the railroad ran out of box cars they would use open hopper cars with a tarp.

 

[BN1970]

As a kid in Iowa working at grain elevators in the early sixties, we was given cement hoppers to load when boxcars were scarce. When the time came and the ice reefers were being phased out, they also tried using them, but the elevators had trouble closing the plug doors as the grain doors bulged out to far to completely close the doors.