I'm excited to announce that as of yesterday, August 26, 2010, the restoration of Cambria & Indiana Hopper Car 162 has been completed. Number 162 thus becomes the first preserved and restored piece of equipment from that railroad.

162 was among the many 55-ton C&I cars that were rebuilt in Colver during the late 1960s and 1970s and made up one of the last (if not the last) interchange fleet of HMs in the United States. Though we haven't been able to ascertain the full history of the car, this car, along with a few others, were sold to Sloan Cornell in the early 1980s. Sloan used it for ballast service and it sat on the Knox & Kane at Marienville up until the time of the liquidation auction in 2008.

Hub Metals of Hagerstown, MD purchased the car for scrap at the auction, and Randy Anderson (also of Hagerstown) then purchased the car for preservation. Randy and I worked with a few of the historical societies in the area in which the C&I operated trying to find a permanent home. We almost were able to place her in Nanty Glo, across from the old site of Bethlehem Mine 31, but that fell through due to community concerns. Ed Patterson of the Indiana County Parks and Trails Department, keepers of the Indiana portion of the Ghost Town Trail, which follows the former-PRR Blacklick Secondary from Ebensburg, PA west to Indiana, stepped in and provided a home.

Ed's been fantastic to work with over the past two years. His crews built a panel of track at Rexis, which is just west of Vintondale, PA. Rexis is the location at which the PRR Blacklick Secondary met the C&I's Rexis Branch. Trains loaded on the western end of the C&I (at Barnes & Tucker's Lancashire 24 Mine) were frequently interchanged until the 1977 flood. The flood washed out bridges on the branch, stranding a C&I train at interchange. The train was retrieved, but to the best of my research, that was the last movement through Rexis and Vintondale.

In early 2009, Randy, along with Barber Trucking, moved the car from Marienville to Rexis and restoration commenced. Full credit should go to Randy for his work in saving the car and ensuring the restoration was done properly. Fortunately, 162 was in very good shape structurally, and only needed primed and painted. Ken Lehman of Hagerstown provided the stenciling and logo artwork. Ed's crews did the paint work and a sign company provided the lettering stencils and herald stickers. The entire process of working with Ed and all of those involved with restoration has been wonderful. Even though I was only tangentially involved, I came away amazed at how smooth the process went. Alan Maples should also be thanked, as it was he who let me know that there were still C&I cars up on the K&K way back in 2006.

We've made sure that the stencils and artwork will be kept for future repaints. The heralds can be reprinted if necessary.

See the photographs below. Sorry that they're not the best quality. I didn't make it over to the car until later in the evening.

Thanks,
Keith Burkey

A terrific rescue. Thanks for the efforts all of you, and each of you, put forth.

Nice job. Not to pick nits, but the lettering needs the built date somewhere over the right hopper to be complete; also a RPKD stencil.

Dennis, you're absolutely correct.

The problem is that we do not have either the built or rebuilt date for this car. We also have no in-service shots of 162. The lettering was indiscernible when the car was purchased. So, fearing that someone may take the made up dates as gospel, we decided not to fabricate them. You'll also notice that the Consolidated Lube Stencil is missing, which again, was because we could not gather the appropriate information for the car.

If the appropriate information is uncovered, we'll be going back to 'finish up'. There are a few other things that we'd like to change, someday. I'll leave it up to everyone else to figure out what those might be, though.

My real hope is that this spurs some of the locals to look though some of their old photos and maybe some new information will come to the surface. Just last night, while studying the car, I spoke with a gentleman who remembered that he has some C&I photos that he took in his personal collection.

Keith Burkey

Great job on the hopper car. It looks like one of my HO scale models. It is worth mentioning that the trail was created when the Kovalchick Salvage Company donated 16 miles of right of way to the county.

Ask on the Steam Era Freight Cars list http://www.STMFC@yahoogroups.com will likely yield info on builder, lot number and built date for the series. I suspect even you were off a month (assuming a production run ran across two or three months) it would be closer than nothing at all. However, I suspect they can find the exact month.

A very good looking effort for equipment that doesn't make it into preservation as much as it should.

Michael Seitz
Missoula MT

You are right, I don't have anything in our files, and all the pix on George Ellwood's "Fallen Flags" website:

http://gelwood.railfan.net/misc-c/misc-c.html

Were taken in the late eighties / early nineties, and the cars are pretty beat.

Except maybe this one:

Keith, did you purchase this car as C&I 162, or was it another reporting mark/number at that time? If it's the latter, I might be able to assist in getting you a build date if you've got the last mark/number it wore in revenue service.

As one who also cares about the history of Bethlehem Steel, a double congratulations to you!!!

I have a sneaking suspicion that these cars were built new for the C&I. I built tooling for a model of a similar car last year (Accurail) and looked at a LOT of information about these "AAR Standard" twin hoppers. All the photos of C&I twins on the Ellwood site show an interesting construction variation. Looking at this photo:



Note that the end and center (the places that are lap seams on the side sheets) side stakes are angle section, while the intermediate stakes are pressed hat sections. Every other railroad's car that I have data on uses either all of one or the other, making these cars possibly unique. If they came from another railroad they would be rather easy to identify, but this is the only time I've seen this construction.

Good work by all concerned. It looks really good compared to the last time I saw it.

While on the subject of C&I hoppers, I was at Bethlehem Steel at Sparrows Point in the Spring of 2004 and there were 80-100 C&I hoppers being stored there. Does anyone know if these were there for furnace fodder or were they being stored until reassigned to another USS operation. They were all in really good condition and it would be a shame if there were melted down.

Wow... lots of great feedback! Thanks everyone for your interest. Let me try to respond...

First off, when the car was purchased from the K&K, it was C&I 162. 162 is the number that the car received when rebuilt in the 1960s. We don't have the exact dates that the rebuild occurred, or even general details of the rebuild program that led to the car's rebuilding. What we do know is that there were three number groups of rebuilt HMs that were done in the late 1960s and were available for purchase in 1982. They were:

160-199
400-599
1600-1999 (the series from which the famous Bicentennial hoppers came)

The above info is directly from the railroad's official history notes.

Dennis, that shot on George Elwood's site of 1782 is of a rebuilt car. Notice the rebuild stenciling next to the CR 1968. (CR, as an aside, is Colver, PA... site of the railroad's shops.)

162 was most certainly not the original number of the car, based on info in ORERs, but it was the last C&I number it wore. It, like 549 and all the rebuilt cars on the Fallen Flags site, and that I have seen for that matter, have seven stakes on the side. 903, shown on the Fallen Flags site, is an unrebuilt car (and also wears the more-classic paint scheme). It cannot yet be said with certainty, but my belief is that they completely rebodied the 55-ton cars during the rebuild program, thus destroying any of their as-built identifying features. I'd be willing to bet that 903 came out the other end of Colver shops looking just like 162.

Now, when the car was acquired, I wanted to restore to its as-built number and scheme. Working backwards, we knew we had a rebuilt car, so we'd need to know when Colver did the work and which car provided the core. From that, we could trace back to when it was built, and who did the work. Unfortunately the necessary engineering records, AFEs, or Rosetta Stone to map from original car to rebuilt car could not be located. We even tried Lehigh Valley Rail Management, which succeeded Bethlehem, in hopes that they'd saved the railroad's records. They had a few, but never were able to get us the pieces we needed. Shoot - we couldn't even find lettering diagrams and had to roll our own.

If anyone has any further information on these cars, I'd love to know. It seems like the info has to be out there somewhere. Also, as wm303 asked, have the C&I cars at Sparrows Point been cut up?

Thanks again for all the interest and the congrats. It's flattering to see the enthusiasm for our little project.

Keith

Nice job!

I am going with hearsay evidence but I have been told that the taper topped cars are rare indeed. Yours looks exactly like ours (but yours is restored). Ours came from Roebling Steel and before that it was a Lehigh Valley car. Ours is a 50 tonnner and it was built in 1938. There is more research that has been done but that has been misplaced.

Later!
Mr. Ed

Thanks to Dennis' observation about the angle iron vs hat iron, I found some answers in Bob Karig's excellent book "Coal Cars:The First Three Hundred Years" which has info along with a photo that should help complete the paint. See page 319.

Because of the difference in the stakes (rolled-angle at the joints, pressed steel for the others) we can ID this as one of the cars built in June 1949 by Bethlehem Steel and numbered 400-599. The other classes of hoppers on the C&I did not have this stake arrangement.

If you ever do paint it as-built, the photo in the book gives you everything you need to know, but at least now you can add a built date of 6-49 to your car.

It is interesting that during the rebuild from 9 stakes to 7, they seem to have used the same steel elements, as the mix of angle and pressed stakes remained after rebuilding.

Again, kudos to all involved. When the K&K auction first came up the two C&I hoppers were the pieces I most wanted to see saved. I failed to raise interest to bring one to a Beth Steel site, and I am so glad you were able to save #162.

All the best,

Rob


Edit - Of course, it is possible that some rebuilt cars ended up with the mix of stakes the 1949 group of cars had when new, and it would be worth it to rule that out before declaring 100% this is a 1949 car.

Ed,

Sounds like yours was likely built as a composite car and then rebuilt in the 1940's.

Rob