Especially rotating end cap roller bearings:

http://www.railpictures.net/viewphoto.php?id=329839

Good thing all those pesky plain bearing journals are gone these days, eh?

Howard P.

I think roller bearings are better! After laying under 1522 in Hannibal, MO and watching babbit run out of the pilot truck cellar I came to that conclusion.
Rebuilding the pilot truck and converting to roller bearings resulted in zero defects for the next 12 years. We all wished the driving boxes were roller bearing equipped many times. Eventually the pilot, trailing truck and tender trucks were converted.

Of course roller bearings are "better." If they weren't, we'd still be poking an oil can in every bearing on every freight car every day (or thereabouts).

We would also have about 100X as many hotboxes each day.

But are roller bearings perfect? "Not quite" is the best answer, as evidenced by the photo. They are however vastly more reliable than solid bearings.

Here's a related question: In the Bad Old Days when all cars had solid bearings, when cars were run thru a rotary dumper, what kept all the oil from running out of the journal boxes? Or did they just re-oil every car after it was dumped?

Frisco1522, do you have any photos of your roller bearing conversions on the lead truck and trailing truck?

I don't know about journal oil problems at dumpers (and there were also grain car dumpers), hump yards in cold weather were also a problem. Even in 1981, friction bearing cars going over Potomic Yard, Va. hump got a shot of hot oil in each journal box, to get more uniform coasting out of them.

Here is a photo from one of the journal boxes on a PRR Ore Jenny.



I can only speculate that the rubber seal on the lid was to hold in the journal oil in when the car was rotary dumped.

Scott

NEVER A TOTAL CASUALTY of technological progress, the car tonk found his duties measurably abated with the coming of high speed trucks and roller bearings. Once the sound of slamming journal boxes in the night at the inspection points reassured uncounted Pullman passengers that their train was under the watchful eye of a benevolent management.
Beebe

if something can go wrong, it will. Roller bearings most likely reduced the failure rates.

I recall years ago at some hump yard journal boxes were opened and a mechanical oil squirter pumped oil into the journal as it passed, not sure if it was automatic or some operator watching and squirting at the right moment.