Thanks for that great photo which pretty much gives us the heritage of ONE OF those boxcars.

Fixed that for you......

My understanding, or at least what I was told at one point by someone who seemed to know better than I did, was that the USATC cars were somehow part of a convoluted "trade" for fifteen EBT hoppers that went to the White Pass & Yukon for ballast/work-train service in 1968, twelve years after the EBT shutdown. The souvenir booklet sold by the EBT for years included a photo of one of the hoppers being loaded for shipment, using the Mack locomotive that Railways to Yesteryear owned for a spell. Of course, all of that could just be coincidence, as there were supposedly fifteen cars in each lot.....

Not heard this story before. The one I have heard is that the USATC was paying Kovlachick to store the cars. When they became illegal to interchange they stopped paying. When he sued for storage fees, they said keep the cars. And there they have set.

I don't really believe the White Pass story, especially since there were 16 hoppers sent to Alaska and there were 15 (plus 4 or so at Burnham) USATC cars.

Not exactly plausible when there are/were other facilities in Central Pa. with plenty of track: Letterkenny, New Cumberland....


This and other sources I have seen say/said fifteen: http://www.spikesys.com/EBT/timeline.html
I agree that there really isn't any direct link between the two transactions, and that the connection was probably insinuated by other U.S. military involvement in the WP&Y during the Second World War and later.
The Wikipedia entry for the WP&Y rolling stock is excruciatingly detailed, but only covers twelve of the fifteen(?) cars: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wh ... s_and_cars

Not very close at all. Let me repeat, these were not, NOT, the MRS cars built for service overseas. As far as I know, NONE of those cars ever operated on the US rail system, because they were deficient in strength and lacked US couplers and safety appliances.

The USATC purchased many used freight cars over the years, plus a few built new, which were basically copies of the then current North American standard designs. The cars at Mount Union were one of these groups of second hand cars, rather plain Jane boxcars of WWI vintage.

I am likely responsible to the rumor that these were ex-B&M cars; I viewed the cars a number of years ago, and the former numbers were still clearly stenciled inside, and relying on my increasingly faulty memory, I said they were B&M. Someone else corrected me that they were BAR, and I was able to find a photo of a matching car in BAR lettering. The distinctive thing about these particular cars is they were short cars, likely 36 footers.

I don't know where the other two roads mentioned came from, but I didn't inspect all the cars, and they may have come from mixed sources. I really didn't pay much attention at the time; it was neat to find an abandoned string of boxcars frozen in time for so long that good size trees were growing between them, but further reflection made me realize that they were nothing significant to any collection I was familiar with, and certainly not worth what Kovalchick likely wanted for them, much less what it was going to cost to move them. Maybe if they had been examples of USRA design cars from the period of government control during WWI, but they weren't.

Dennis -

In a new thread entitled "East Broad Top scrappings in Mt. Union (photos)" posted by mfmalk, there are some pictures of the remains of these boxcars. The stenciling on the trucks of at least one car (22106) matches the USATC numbers on the previous list given of the 15 cars at Mt. Union. BUT there are at least two numbers on trucks (22133 and 22145) of numbers that weren't on that list of 15. Not conclusive for sure, as trucks were switched around between cars, but interesting nevertheless. What is also interesting in the photos that Matthew took, is a number (upside down) on the frame of one of the cars. I can't quite make it out but the last 3 numbers appear to be 819. There is a number (or letter) in front of 819, but I can't read it. It would be expected if this number was the original road number of the car, that that railroads initials would be just ahead of that number, but it looks like they may have been painted over, perhaps when sold to the USATC. A little sandpaper at the time of the photos might have told us that the car was originally BAR or B&M or whatever, but of course, that opportunity is gone now, and was most certainly unsafe to do anyway.

Les

Les,

Looking for old numbers on underframes really only works for cars in work service. Since these cars were purchased second hand, apparently for further use in interchange service, since the USATC did the full re-lettering job on them, the center sill reporting mark would have been changed as well.