Our new design tender for the J&LNG 58 is nearing completion. 68" wide and 13' long, the tender should hold about 3 tons of coal and has room for an onboard gas driven air compressor and main reservoir as well as shovel and fire tool storage, a locker for supplies, two jump seats for riders and room for a cooler.

Starting with a blank slate, we were able to incorporate many of the features into this car that the original tender did not have and I think it will serve us well for many years of operation.

What kind of upgrades did you pack in? I presume that room for a cooler and jump seats weren't original, but is there anything else you modified besides what you mentioned?

These locomotives had no real tenders. The mill took old ingot cars and put coal boxes on them to serve as tenders. We are not trying to recreate those coal cars. We are building this tender to suit our needs and our operation.

This new tender and the rest of the train will have straight air brakes and a hand brake. The trucks that will be on the car were originally used under a German flat car and are sprung and equalized.

We are also going to be using the German/Russian style center buffer type of couplers on the passenger train instead of the link and pin.

Unless there are radius complications, the expanded and enlarged tender can only be good. Well done and congratulations on bringing it together at a critical juncture in your evolution.

Tender looks great. I am curious about your brakes that you plan to use. Are the trucks already equipped with brakes or is this going to be a design from scratch type of thing? I could see a truck style system with type 30 chambers working good and being relatively inexpensive for this setup.

For the brakes I am going to use Cobra composition brake shoes designed for hirail trucks with truck mounted brake cylinders. Not sure exactly how they will be configured yet, but judging by the progress on the carbody I need to get busy installing them!

The composition shoes provide about twice the stopping ability as cast iron shoes for a given pressure. This allows me to use smaller air cylinders.

I love the shot of the welder applying the half-oval beading to the tank edge. This looks like sculpture. Many years ago an itinerant ironworker named Jerry Leaders did a similar job for the tender of PM 1225, about 90 running feet of metalwork.

Aarne Frobom
Tank Top, Michigan

It took me a while to find that half round. It isn't generally available so I had to order it through King Architectural Metals online. They sell it in 10 foot lengths but UPS can only ship 8' lengths, so you get an 8 footer and a 2 footer unless you have them ship by motor freight.

I saw a steam fitter I knew use pipe to get that effect. He tacked it down and worked the pipe around to fit. He was pretty good and it looked real nice when he was done. It was during a conversion of a C&NW oil fired tender that was converted to coal want to say 1972 time frame. That tender got scrapped a couple years ago and I do not have pictures close up showing the work. The steam fitter was a very talented fellow and I was a welder at the time. Was envious his skill. I can imagine that half round is hard to come by and think that was why he did what he did? Nice job on fab work Rick. Much nicer to work on clean and new steel than some rotted out paper thin tank that fights you all the way. Keep er movin. Regards, John.

The body of the new tender has been completed and moved to the J&LNG and mated up with the 58. The car seems to work well with the locomotive with no clearance or interference issues. The final fitting out of the car will now begin with the installation of grab irons, air compressor, electrical system, lettering, piping, brakes etc.

This is the first of three new cars that we are building for the railroad. The next car is a 20' "convertible" passenger car followed by a two foot gauge version of the standard gauge Monongahela Connecting Railroad cabooses. This will round out our passenger train consist. All will be fitted with straight air brakes and a 32 volt electrical system powered by the locomotive turbogenerator. We are using German built sprung and equalized trucks for the cars. Eventually new trucks may be built based on the original designs for future cars.