Neil
I may have a line on something for you.

Give me a couple of days to get in touch with the right people.

From an official PC numbering guide:



Who would've believed it?

Thanks for everyone’s help. I searched high and low on that car and could not find any ghost of a number. It looks that it may have been shopped late in 1975 and blasted and painted into Penn Central at that time. Both trucks have 10-75 cast into them and there is only one layer of paint on it. The interesting thing is I did find that number on the car in a one in stencil above the build date. They had it marked P14300. They must have stenciled this on when it was painted into PC. I never would have guessed that it would be the Pennsy car number. Now the one thing I don’t understand is this car is marked as a G39b but the car number shows it should be just a G39. Was the G39b an upgraded G39 that retained its original car number? Again, thanks for all of your help.

Neil,

Found the same thing "P15555" on the side of my car but would have never realized it was the original number until I found the original frame stencil.



The G39b was an upgrade from a 70 ton capacity to 77 ton capacity. I believe that the trucks where change from a 5 x 10 1/2 to a 6 x 11 axle to give the car the extra capacity. Taconite is pretty dense material and the PRR found out that you could add more to the existing car by just changing the trucks.

Scott

Scott -

Our Penn Central 50' boxcar has the old Pennsylvania Railroad car number stencilled in small letters in the upper right hand corner on both sides. Thus PC boxcar 153177 showed P 607627. This was an important number to find because the trucks on the car have a different PRR car number (it is my belief that the trucks were traded from another car). I have seen this old predecessor car number on other PC cars. This is one thing that we can thank the Penn Central for, or at least their carshop crews.

Les

Many ConRail cars have the previous initial and number in the upper right corner. However, if this had become a ConRail car, the PennCentral information would have been painted.

You will notice it is near the equipment trust information. It was most likely a requirement of the lease documents that the lessor be able to identify his property, and this number keys back to the original lease document. I would suspect that if the equipment lease had not yet run its term at the beginning of Conrail, that these same numbers were carried over during the Conrail years. But, as soon as the lease terminated, all bets are off.