I am trying to figure out more about this truck. Were any produced full size, is there a patent etc.

The J hook holding the journal box is what I am most interested in.

The ICC mark on the car may be a red herring. I looked at all the truck patents I could prior to 1900 and not a single one held the journal boxes that way.




The model is 1/8th scale cast aluminum.

Can't say that I have seen that type before.

My only Car Builders Cyclopedia is from 1943, so nothing like it then. There are some simple and robust truck designs shown in the Industrial & Mine Cars listings, but none with the "J hook." Perhaps, though, it was meant for such cars in "captured" service?

At least to me, they appear to be a take on Fox trucks

They look a lot like Fox trucks to me, too.

It is not a Fox truck, they were pressed steel plate. This one looks to be cast.

See the original post. The photos are of a 1/8 scale car, 7-1/2" gauge I presume. Trucks are cast aluminum. Kits built out of castings is a very common method for making models like these. I still wager they were meant to be Fox trucks, even if they're not made the exact same way the real ones were.

The fact they're aluminum makes me think there's a good chance this was home cast and built- not a kit that is or was produced and made available. I could be wrong. Either way they're interesting trucks that you don't see too often in live steam.

It's obvious from the shape of the casting that it's a model of a cast prototype. There were a bunch of competing pedestal freight trucks in the first decade of the twentieth century. The fabricated Fox truck is best known likely because they had the greatest market penetration. There was also the cast Ajax truck that worked on the same principle. There were others, long forgotten, one of which was the prototype for this model, I'm sure. Start paging through the on-line copies of Car Builder's Dictionary available from Google Books or the HathiTrust. If no luck, try searching old issues of Railway Review at the same places.

These look nothing like Fox trucks. They're either Schoen or Thielsen, both early 20th Century designs (circa 1901-1910). Schoen Pressed Steel trucks came in assorted styles; their designers seemed to fiddle around with them constantly until it was obvious that U-channel trucks were the winning design, and they dropped that part of their product line.

Photo of a fox truck on a derailed tank car at a unknown location. No information on the photo

Looks like a toy. I wouldn’t worry about it.

I does look to me to be a scale prototype. It's a far too meticulous set of castings to be just a live steamer's experiment. After a quick dive on line, I see three possibilities you might chase further.

The first is Sterlingworth Railway Supply Co. In the 1903 Carbuilder's Cyclopedia there is a cast bolster by Sterlingworth. Sterlingworth's 1902 Pedestal Truck, a pressed steel knockoff of the Fox truck, and that bolster appear to share design features of the model truck. The Smithsonian has a copy of a Sterlingworth catalogue at Easton, but it is not on line.

The second is ACF. They did some odd experimenting with trucks in the same 1901-1905 period, particularly for hopper car trucks.

For the third, see page 10 of the car illustrations, Figure 43, in the 1903 Cyclopedia. I found a very poor digital copy online and it appears to share characteristics of the model truck. It is a Pressed Steel Car product. It's hard to make out but you may be able to find a better copy.

The owner told me the trucks are old. He ponders if they are salesman's samples. The couplers are not scale, and the wheels are simple.

A note about castings. I am lucky enough to have a 1/8th scale cast aluminum development block of a General Motors V8 engine. This was made back before CAD or even the use of clay to make decision about the design. I also have the privilege to work at Trinity Railcar, the engineering group regularly uses 1/8th scale 3D printed models. This leads me to the assumption that the truck castings in the picture above are from manufacture not a hobbyist.

Thank you all for the leads about the trucks. If I do find information I will look for a place to publish the information learned.

The prototype would have been cast, not made of pressed sections.

Fox, and other "pressed steel" designs, used relatively thin sheet metal to save material. This was of much more importance in the early days of 'Bessemer' steel -- you see it elsewhere in all those lacy Pioneer Bridge Co. designs and the competing New York City elevated 'mass construction' where an enormous amount of engineering and fabrication were used to require the absolute minimum of then-expensive material.

The sideframes of the current example are cast, and obviously designed to be cast. While in theory you could now weld up the outside section out of plate, it would be ridiculously expensive -- and basically impossible in the days before gas blanketing.

What would be interesting to see in prototype detail is the opposite end of the "J" casting where it attaches to the ear at the far outside corner of the frame. This would be a tension member, which is pulled up at the center with what I believe is a driven-in gib key. How the other end 'actually' attaches to the frame is going to be a detail of great interest (at least to 1ightweight proprietary truck design aficionaderds) The J piece serves both as a pedestal tie and an axlebox clamp; it may be an attempt to reduce the portion of the frame 'outside' the axleboxes (where even a typical three-piece sideframe would have a heavy portion to hold the box aligned).
If this follows the Thielsen patent, the outer part of the journal box will have a long vertical bore, and a long stud will pass from the end of the 'J" piece up to an ear on the end of the truck frame, secured by nuts and washers on each end. It would be 'safer' to have a bolt from the top, to prevent disassembly if the upper nut comes off, but if the lower nut does, the J piece falls down and the axlebox would come loose longitudinally.