See:

http://bremolympicnlus.wordpress.com/20 ... buildings/

Excerpt:

Forty-five World War II-era boxcars, which are also used for storage, will be offered to heritage groups. If it can’t give any away, the Navy will videotape the 50-ton and 40-ton boxcars before disposing of them. The Navy will also develop a Shelton-Bremerton-Bangor railroad historic preservation plan, determining what portions and features are eligible for the National Register of Historic Places and how to care for them. The railroad will continue to be maintained and operated.

Sounds like photo freight material with some work and paint.

Fifty-ton and FORTY-ton capacity cars? Are you sure you don't mean fifty and forty FOOT long cars?

I mention this because a 40-ton car would likely be a good deal older than the WW II era!

It'll be interesting to see the level and extent of preservation work the Navy decides on.



I think we just found part of the vintage freight train for 4014 to haul over Sherman Hill! Anyone got a couple hundred cans of Boxcar Red lying around? I wonder how many are friction bearing and how many are roller bearing? Would be interesting to paint them in the full variety one would expect to find: CB&Q, AT&SF, GN, NP, UP, SP, WP, D&RGW, MP, C&NW, CRI&P, IC, PRR, NYC, WAB, NKP, WM, B&O, C&O, N&W, SOU, B&M, NH, D&H, etc...

Maybe you think you're kidding. There's a precedent.

http://www.gcrailway.co.uk/the-railway/ ... er-wagons/

The problem becomes, where does this "train" "live" once it's assembled and restored? The formerly railfan-run Reading & Northern and Ohio Central aren't quite the options they were earlier. And Britain is small enough that the Great Central is basically a day's drive from anywhere in the U.K. but the remote islands.

And boxcars are a bit more difficult to keep up than these wagons; these wagons are small enough that you could talk an individual into "adopting" a Windcutter for a couple hundred quid, unlike, say, a caboose or boxcar in the States.

To answer the question, the cars are almost certainly all friction bearing and probably of WW II and Korean War-era vintage. They may also have been sitting in place for very extended periods of time.

While it would be cool to have one of these cars in our Museum, what would be the cost to museums? Cranes to load boxcars onto flat cars, shipping charges to Museum location, Crane to unload at location. Not sure on the costs of a crane, but last time I looked into one a decade ago, it was about 5k. We purchased a 40' boxcar from CP rail for a little bit over 5K about 10 years ago and that included free shipping to our museum.

Disclaimer, I don't know any specifics about this deal.

However, depending on the Navy's interest in helping to ensure these are preserved, they may help you load them. It is quite likely they have equipment on sight that could pick them up and load them onto a flatcar. Whether or not they would do so is something you'd have to work out with them.

A few years ago I was doing rail work at Fort Lewis and they derailed a flatcar nearby. They asked us to put it back on and said "We'll provide the crane..." I show up in the morning and the crane arrives. I took one look and said "What's the capacity on that thing?" "100 tons". Well let's see, empty flatcar, only lifting one end, 100 ton crane? That made life simple. Chained up the truck and put it right back on the track like picking up an HO train car. Less than 10 minutes later I said "OK, we're all done!" The crane guy thought I was joking...

Given what the do at Bangor, they may well have something like that there as well.

These cars remind me of the Pullman boxcars scrapped at Indian Head Naval Support Facility last year. Those cars were essentially new-old-stock. They were delivered in WW2 and sat there their entire lives. The running gear was immaculate on them. Even the air systems were like brand new, not a hint of moisture. If these cars are in even close to the same condition it's deffinately worth saving parts for other projects.

Have any photographs of these cars shown up? That would answer a lot of questions.

Here are a couple of shots of Navy boxcars and probably typical of what you'd find at the base in WA state. Note that the article about NWS Concord is from 2005 and the boxcars in the photo have since been scrapped.

http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/C ... to-2142888

http://www.roundhousehobbies.com/images/600set1g.jpg

Pictures of the actual cars on site in WA are difficult to obtain because they appear to be within a restricted-access ammo storage area, and opportunities for photography in such places are next to zero.

Hmmm, it's probably too much to ask for, but I wonder if the UP would be interested in purchasing these cars for part of the excursion fleet for just this purpose.

I ought to send them a letter suggesting just this. . .hope they don't laugh too hard.

Naval Weapons Station Earle, N.J. has or had some of the same collection. They were all friction bearing, many had sprayed on asbestos interior lining.

Bangor is a nuclear sub base. They will neither confirm or deny the presence of nuclear weapons. Whether they have them or not, one thing is certain, if you think CSX is hard on foamers with cameras, wait until you see these guys.

However, they can't stop Google flyovers, and you can get a pretty good idea from these photos:
https://maps.google.com/maps?q=bangor%2 ... g=270&z=20

A funny thing happened to the boxcars at NWS Earle, NJ. NWS Yorktown, VA, had rebuilt many of its boxcars by removing the walkways on top, lowering the brake wheels, updating the air brake control valves (I think from AB to ABD), and putting roller bearing trucks beneath the cars. They received nice white paint jobs as well. After Yorktown closed its rail system, it shipped these cars to NWS Earle and scrapped those that remained behind that had not been updated. The extensive on-base rail system, except for a spur off of CSX, was lifted as well, the enginehouse was demolished, and the GE centercab locomotives were shipped elsewhere.

Something else NWS Yorktown did to its boxcars (possibly prior to the other modifications) was to add bracing behind one of the two doors on each side of its boxcars. With only one door to open on each side, this effectively created more shipping space within each car.

NWS Yorktown and NWS Earle had different missions, and the Yorktown cars were incompatible with the latter's mission. Earle boxcars would be loaded by forklift with such things as ship-fired missiles that were too long to fit through the boxcars modified so that only one door would open, so they couldn't be used. So, what to do with them? The rail shop took the new trucks and control valves off of the modified Yorktown boxcars and swapped them for the old trucks and control valves under its own, unmodified cars. The Yorktown boxcars were then slated to be scrapped. This took place about a dozen years ago. I don't think there were enough Yorktown boxcars to swap trucks and control valves under all Earle boxcars, so there's probably a mix on base today.