Gentlemen,

These photos were posted on the FOTRR Facebook group yesterday detailing a hopper car that has seen better days. The highlight of the pictures shows archbar roller bearing trucks. Archbars are rare in general, but I believe this is the first set I've seen with rollers. If anyone would think it would be worthwhile, the car is sitting off rails in the dirt. The frame is broken and body destroyed, but without further inspection, I'd say the trucks look OK.


As for ownership, I'd assume the property owner at the old breaker has it. I do not have contact info on that.

- Christian B.

What is FOTRR and where is the car located? C. M. Lovestead of Seattle, WA supplied a lot of roller bearing conversions for archbar trucks to the sugar industry and other industrial railroads.

The coal land at Locust Summit, PA is owned by Reading Anthracite. The company has a few rusty treasures accessible on its lands and also stashed away. Areas not being actively mined are open for public access permits. Areas being mined or reclaimed are entirely off limits w/o company permission. For those who want to explore legally: https://readingoutdoors.com/trails-parking-entry-maps

Here are a couple of other examples:

One from Japan
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogie#/me ... -Truck.jpg

Nevada Northern wrecker
https://model-railroad-hobbyist.com/node/32090?page=1

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The coal processing facility at Locust Summit was built by a predecessor of the Reading Anthracite Company in the early 1930's. It was at that time the largest such facility in the world. There was a fleet of these hopper cars that were used to haul rock and culm out to the dumps. Much of that end of the property was electrified, and there were three 250vdc 6-wheel steeple cab Baldwin-Westinghouse locomotives that also had batteries to run out from under the wire on the temporary track on the dump. Locust Summit was also the home of former CNJ 0-6-0 No. 113 from around 1952 until the plant was closed in the early 1960's. The breaker was razed about two years ago, and the site is now being mined for coal spoil on the ground. The idea of a central breaker was that coal was collected from mines throughout the region and delivered here by the trainload for processing. It was then reloaded into hopper cars for movement to market.

I believe it was posted in multiple groups. The friends of the Reading Railroad group is where it originated from.

One of the early applications of roller bearings was on cars that dealt with high temperatures, such as hot metal cars and slag thimbles. The heat would cook the oil and journal pads of plain bearings whereas the rollers could be packed with high temperature grease and remain unaffected.

Dave's post makes sense. However, the anthracite breakers did not heat the coal to high temperatures.

Philadelphia and Reading Coal and Iron (C&I) had built two modern central breakers, one at Locust Summit and a second at St. Nicholas, both on Reading Company's Mahanoy and Shamokin Branch and both opened in 1930-1931. Both of these breakers have been demolished.

To fill in some blank spots, anthracite requires more processing than bituminous coal. In addition to picking the slate and other impurities, anthracite is sorted on size. This is done at a breaker and in later days, raw coal was moved from the colliery (mine) to a central breaker for processing.

In this case C&I built the two breakers to handle all the coal in that area. Locust Summit closed in 1955, old St. Nick in 1965. C&I, renamed Reading Anthracite Co., built a new St. Nicholas breaker near Minersville, outside Pottsville and on the other side of Broad Mountain. New St. Nick is currently operating and rail service is by RBMN.

The electric locomotives were three-axle standard gauge C (0-6-0) with pantographs and a steam-type outside frame, center cab and a short steeple on either side. I never saw them in operation but I might speculate if the culm cars had been a gravity return (like a McMyler dumper), the roller bearings would have helped with the return. Plus they were sealed in a gritty environment. The last two sentences are pure speculation.

Phil Mulligan

As if to amplify Phil's comment about roller bearings vs. gritty environments, I recall the first group of freight cars on which PRR invested in roller bearings was an order of shorty covered hoppers for the cement and lime trade. These appeared around 1957 with the older design Timken journals with non-rotating covers.

Wasn’t CNJ 113 rescued from locust summit after rusting there for a number of years? Or was it somewhere else.

Read the above post by G. W. Laepple.