Thought some of members on the forum would find these photographs of the 1,000,000th freight car ( or a car that commermerated the millionith car ) from the Pullman Standard plant in Bessemer Alabama... Interesting that this waffled sided car was put on display to commermermate this unique milestone... Wonder if this was ever a revenue producing car ( I suspect it likely was ) , or was it put on display by the shop or City of Bessemer after its completion...

Interesting to see a somewhat modern freight car preserved in this manner, especially given the most recent preservation efforts of 40 foot classic freight cars.


Dean Levin

A friend sent me this photograph from an EBAY listing of the 1,000,000 PS freight car that appears to have a conventional door, unlike the car in Alabama that has a plug door... The photograph identifies the location as Hammond Indiana in 1980 Car is identified as PLCX 31... which through a search belonged to General Electric Rail Services Corporation.

Besides the plug door, the paint job has some noticeable differences ...

Interesting nonetheless, find it odd that another Pullman plant could produce another 1,000,000th car being a waffle sided boxcar ?... So perhaps the car that landed in Bessemer ultimate was the 1,000,000th ( not a car that just commemorated the 1,000,000 ) car and ultimately it did run in revenue producing service.


Dean Levin

The Bessemer Hall Of History, housed in the former Bessemer AGS/SRR Station, has a large collection of artifiacts and documents from the Bessemer Pullman Plant. They have a collection of pictures inside the plangt where they were making freight cars in kit form to be shipped pversea in WWII. Quite interesting.
The boxcar shown is on the museum's property and houses a local model RR club. It was produced at the Bessemer plant, but I don't think it is the actual 1 millionth.
While the plant is no longer making railcars, it is still intact being developed as an industrial/commerce complex. CSX put an intermodel facility in there last year, primarily to service the Mercedes plant in Vance, AL.

Bill

Ahhh...now that we know what to look at you can see the car in Bessemer has a blue ribband in the upper left hand corner that appears to say "commemerating" the 1,000,000 boxcar.

The other cars says "this is THE 1,000,000 boxcar". That is so very interesting. It is interesting that somebody thought it important enough to paint the 1,000,000 car and it is interesting that a group of hobbyists thought it important enough to commemerate.

How about other milestones? Are we aware of any? The 1,000,000th rusty choo choo?

T7

While the commemorative freight car has mostly disappeared, I can only think of perhaps some cars repainted by the Wisconsin Southern for Model Railroader, Trains Magazine, breast cancer awareness, etc that have been done...

Perhaps the car picture below was the last class one commemorative boxcar, ( although it did not run again after the event ) to my knowledge.

Horseshoe Curve 150th Anniversary boxcar (an ex Conrail car )


Dean Levin

The 60,000th Baldwin Locomotive is commemorated very well, including on a Website, and the 50,000th was commemorated earlier. Did the merger of Baldwin-Lima-Hamilton ever make 100,000 locomotives altogether?

In the book "American Locomotives in Historic Photograph: 1858 to 1949" by Ron Ziel, on page 87 there is a photo and a paragraph about Balwin 60000. I'd post a copy of the page, but its copyrighted and I got yelled at before...

Interesting; there was a discussion about this on the IRM Yahoo group recently because IRM owns a car reputed to be the "actual" 1,000,000th P-S car:

http://www.irm.org/gallery/DOTX503/aaa

It appears to match the 1980 Hammond photo pretty closely.

On this day, it was the 100,000th PS1.... a milestone

On a side note, the IRM website said the 1,000,000 car was painted gold at delivery... yet the photo of the car in service shows white... Any photographic evidence of the car in gold ? How did IRM know that the car on the IRM website was indeed number 1,000,000 ?

Dean Levin