Here is an interesting note from Kentucky Steam Heritage, they have located a set of roller-bearing Buckeye trucks for the tender of C&O 2716, a move they say will save them $100k:

https://www.facebook.com/kentuckysteam/ ... 965547863/

The trucks came from a heavy-duty flatcar built for a power plant to move heavy transformers and the like. However, it looks like it has trucks that were made for plain bearings, I wonder if the Class I's will accept a car re-equipped with roller bearings but built with plain bearings as having "rotating end-cap bearings". I suspect that they would enquire about it with the Class I's before making the effort, but I know of a short line with an ex-PRR covered ballast hopper that was converted that way (a common practice in the sixties and seventies) that NS won't accept in interchange.

Look closely and you can see the rotating end caps inside the journal boxes.

Would have been nice if the group had taken a photo of the entire car before it was cut apart. This too was a railroad artifact and its demise should have been recorded for posterity. Saying that, I am glad that Kentucky Steam Heritage was able to secure the trucks for future usage.

Les

I believe it is the "end cap" part that tripped up the short line, you can see the roller bearings inside the journal boxes on the ex-PRR hopper, too, but NS wouldn't accept it. According to the short line "NS refused to move the car since they claim that hot box detectors will not scan these things because of the converted journal box. [Redacted] has six more that they cannot even move to any of their other lines for the same reason. As a result, we have to truck the darn thing to [redacted because I don't want to hurt their relationship with NS]."

What if they cut off the remains of the journal box with a torch? Clean up the touch cuts with a grinder, make it look nice.

Would that weaken the integrity of the truck frame around the axles, lead to cracking etc.? I honestly don't know, but that may be why the railroads didn't cut them down in the first place.

We put roller bearings on the Commonwealth six wheel trucks on 1522. Altered the solid bearing boxes, even left the lids on with permission from the FRA. No one objected to them and if they lifted the lid they could see the rotating end caps. Worked very well for us.

FRA approval and handling railroad approval are two very different things.

I could understand the rejection. In this data and age, automation and data collection are very important. If your hardware hides itself from the lineside detectors, that is a problem.

The only opposing argument I could think of, would be if you had your own temperature monitoring system in place.

isn't this the same thing that was done to 765's tender trucks?

This would likely take the form of a 'repeater' using little more complicated that a diffusing dome over one of those cheap IR 'night vision' eyepieces, and an IR diode array connected amplified or in fan-out in place of the device's viewscreen. You can easily derive adequate power for battery charging or continuous operation isolating the battery with some arrangement taking rotational energy from the adjacent cap.

Or make an anamorphic IR-compatible lens that refracts a heat 'image' from inside the box out to the detector locations, transparent to allow humans and machine-vision detectors to see the rotating caps.

ARGUABLY you could make up a set of 'dummy' covers that are opaque in visible but clear to IR (lenses on the old broad-spectrum 'light sources' for IR night-vision illumination provide an example) and use these for prototype appearance on excursions where temperature detection is needed for running safety.

Answers to some questions posed here in this thread:

-The bearing boxes can be cut off without compromising structural integrity. This may or may not be done before the engine is moved.
-The flat car that was scrapped had many pictures taken of it before being scrapped. Its scrapping paid for the move of the trucks. The moving of the car was explored but was revealed to be cost inefficient for the budget for this part of the project. The expending donated funds on the flat car also does not fit our mission as an organization.
-The truck conversion has been necessitated after discussions with CSX regarding what they need from us before the engine can be moved. As long as CSX inspects the swapped out trucks, and the engine and tender pass an air test, we will be able to move the engine on their rails.

soups - I looked for a photo of the car on the Kentucky Steam Heritage website and Facebook page, but couldn't find any. Perhaps you could advise where those photos are posted. Or if you have the reporting marks (car initials) and road number, it might be able to be found that way. Thanks for your help.

Les

There are numerous pictures of the car. Perhaps what someone meant was "numerous pictures I can find online".

Also, confusing freight car interchange rules (AAR) with FRA regulation or with carrier requirements, or with what can or cannot be done safely seems to be a continuing challenge here.

We have the pictures. We didn't post them anywhere. I will get them organized sometime and put them up on our page. Thanks for everyone's interest.