There are some boxcars on Government Liquidation that may interest people on this site. It appears there are about 1/2 dozen wooden 50' boxcars among some '50's era boxcars and a flatcar. Look at pictures 13-22, 63-86, and some partially scrapped pic 115+. Also a video tour. Might at least be some nice truck and brake parts if nothing else.

http://www.govliquidation.com/auction/view?id=5148159&tid=GLSPPS9916&cm_re=1-_-hotlots-_-row1col1

I think pic #13 is a 40&8 - I'm kind of surprised they're requiring scrapping since these are antique/historic cars.

CD

I wonder how many rail treasures the military has kicking around on it's bases? It's too bad everything is going to be cut up.

Interesting, if the right people were the right distance away, all of the cars could be preserved or re-used. The flat car is a practical addition to any museum or tourist railroad operation, or even MOW service for a shortline. The two PS-1 Boxcars are in excellent shape, and probably were built for military service. They could be repainted for any 20th Century era railroad in North America. The most rare car is the flat-end boxcar, which has some mysterious venting installed. That car appears to be a Pullman-Standard of a slightly earlier era, and probably the most preservation-worthy of the bunch IMHO.

There are no 40 and 8 cars here. Those were 4-wheel French-built cars. These single-sheathed outside frame boxcars were multi-purpose build-for-export cars of the WW2 era. A military-oriented museum might consider them. I think the only place they saw revenue service in North America was on the 3' Gauge Oahu Railway. For any museum and tourist railroad, these cars would make nice open-air coaches, with a relatively straight-forward conversion. Hopefully the running gear is functional/compatible with whatever use they might see.

Yes, these cars would be nice for a museum, but I have fears that the potentially onerous conditions being dictated by Indian Head/DoD upon bidders might scare away your "typical" "let's rescue them" movement, and make the proposal more trouble than they are worth. On the other hand, it'll scare away the scrappers, too.

I already have contacts in with one prospective operation that might have use/desire for vintage freight cars, and I know of two others I don't have to contact because I know they "hang out" here.....

Gents, you are reading into this too much. Those are standards statements about buying stuff of the base. If you can get it off as a hole even better. But you have to coordinate all the equipment, cranes, trucks, etc. Trust me scrappers are a nightmare for us. If the railhead is still active they may let them leave on their own wheels too.

If a non-profit really wants them. I suggest contacting the Public affairs office there and see if the base will donate them. Remember the military is not in the business of making money!

I'll nip this fantasy in the bud right now.

The rail connection to the outside world--the Indian Head RR, last used to store a number of ex-LIRR coach-boxes near the junction with the Brandywine Secondary at White Plains--was torn up a while ago for yet another rail-trail. It's easily visible on Google Maps Satellite View, though some of the Street Views are several years old and still show rail signals and whatnot.

Many of the freight cars in question are easily seen from Google's satellite view as well--they're in spots ranging from easy to get to to almost wooded in, though it appears there's enough track to drag some of these pieces to more accessible loading points.

http://maps.google.com/maps?q=White+Pla ... s&t=h&z=19

The flat car, bracketed by two boxes:
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=White+Pla ... s&t=h&z=20

Last I heard the Naval Ammunition Depot at Crane Indiana still had two ex-Milwaukee coaches floating around. One of which was at the bottom of a 20' embankment on its side...Wonder if those cars are still there?

The Naval Weapons Station at Earle, N.J. also had a bunch of 40 foot friction bearing steel box cars with USN reporting marks. I helped inspect them for the New Jersey Council of Diving Clubs, and found that they were too thin to be of interest to the New Jersey Artificial Reef Program. The Navy was willing to give them away to a non-profit or government group, and move them to any point on their railroad for transloading. We thought of loading them on a barge from the Navy's pier at Port Monmouth. I mentioned them on this Group at
http://www.rypn.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=25245&hilit=Earle
in May, 2008, shortly after the inspection.

For your information:

The government has a process through which non-profits can get this equipment. The problem here is, it has passed that period of the process.

These cars were sold once for around $60,000 plus. I do not know what happened to the successful bidder, but if you will note in the photos, some of the cars have been cut on by the scrapper already. He may have failed to meet the government requirements and had the contract taken away from him.

I have purchased cars like these from the government before. Most of these cars will have cast iron wheels and the wood cars will have "K" brakes. The wood cars were built in the early 1950's for Korea. The cars have plywood roofs and sides and are very rotten. If the plywood and other wood was removed down to the frame, new wood floors installed, they would make good open air cars. But, these cars tend to be center-bound and derail very easily.

The Pullman box cars have a wood floor attached to the framing cross-members. The box cars with the flat ends, have a half inch thick steel floor plate with 2 inch thick wood over the top of it. These were all built new for the government in the early 1950's.

AlcoC420 is right - non-profits could have tried to get this equipment, but unfortunately the window of opportunity passed, most likely without anyone noticing it. Because these cars have been stored within a restricted area, many people simply haven't known about them. With few exceptions, they have been sitting in place for decades. Often they had been placed next to buildings to serve as additional storage space, probably by the late 1980s when the rail system was mothballed. Around 2000 a small portion of the on-base rail system was used for the short-lived Indian Head Central Railway dinner train operation, but most of these old freight cars were never touched during that time. In fact, many sit on rail that had long since become isolated from the rest of the base railway. It has been almost a decade since I was last inside the base's restricted area where all of these cars have been kept. They didn't look good then and I'm sure they're no better now.

Also, while non-profits might like to get their hands on some of these cars, moving them would not be cheap. Even a "free" car can be quite expensive to move.

Someone wrote, "Remember the military is not in the business of making money!" This isn't necessarily true. I well remember the frustrated base historian at another naval base where old, one-of-a-kind naval guns were being sold for scrap without consideration for historical significance or thoughts of preservation. He brought this issue to base leadership's attention and received a smack-down as a reward. I'm not familiar with the details, but apparently base leadership is given incentives to generate revenue for DRMO (Defense Reutilization and Marketing Office); however, there are no comparable incentives to save anything for preservation.

DRMO costs the base money now. It's regionalised so we have to truck most stuff to a central location. Yes the DoD makes money on the DRMO but the bases don't get the money anymore. It goes back to the DoD to be used there.

I would still call the PA folks at the base they may still want to see the stuff saved. It's worth a shot. You won't know until you try.

That is one pretty railroad, and I would have loved to have seen it when it was in operation. It had this certain quality to it that is very hard to explain. Looking at the train cars and the way they had the rail line in there set up it was almost like a story book setting.

I am actually surprised with a working coal fired power plant on base that they didn't keep the rail line working far longer as I can't see how it is efficient for them to truck in coal like they did. With that being said when I was there we were there to work on the power plant and there was nothing efficient about that place. It was the worst plant I ever worked in. For starters they staff this itsy bitsy little coal plant with maybe 10MWH of generation capacity like it is the 1400 MW Morgantown generating station down the street!

Trust me they are doing you an enormous favor by letting you bring your own crew to disassemble the cars as a word of warning is that none of the maintenance staff at that place actually work more than 2-4 legitimate hours a week. The stories I have of my one week working at the power plant at that place and its laziness were just beyond belief!

One story I will never forget. I was standing right under one of the oil guns going into the boiler. They were co-firing on coal and bunker 6 as we had one of the tiniest pulverizes I ever saw out of service for repair. All of a sudden I was standing on an elevation below a firing deck when I noticed a drop of black stuff out of the corner of my eyes landed on my shoulders. I looked up and jumped out of the way. Basically they put in the oil gun in wrong and the thing didn't seat properly. At this point there was a black rain coming down. Well I got the attention of the nearest plant maintenance guy who I saw after all it was their plant not mine, figuring he would call the control room or get help. Well he did call some buddies over but only so that they could laugh at the problem. I ran up to the control room and told the operator who immediately left running to shut down the gun. Meanwhile as this is going on a crowd of lazy ass plant workers had came together to further laugh at the issue! One can only wonder what would have happened if I didn't run for help.

Another word of caution to rigging this job. If you need to rely on base labor. I believe if I recall correctly that the shift starts at about 7:00am. However we learned quickly that the clock rounds in such a way that getting in 29minutes late actually gets one credit for the whole hour. So no one punches in until 29minutes after the shift starts. Then they usually spent about another 30+minutes getting dressed and into their work clothes. So they aren't ready to start working until about 8:00. But around 9:00 they have the 15minute brake which usually went for about 30+ so no real work gets done at that place till about 9:30. But keep in mind that is only about 2.5hrs till they start slowing down for their lunch break, which usually goes for a full hour though on paper is only to last for 30mins.

At any rate the bottom line is if you have to rely on any base supplied labor, or services beware!!! Especially if you happen to have any hired help such as a crane service etc, as those slobs can really run the clock on you! In our case a job that was standard work at most plants on the pulverizer would have been 1-3days depending on size, since theirs was so tiny a competent staff could likely have done it in 1.5-2days. There it took 2weeks (my boss called me away after the first week leaving someone else there only). Perhaps the power plant is an exception there but if not, just be prepared for red tape like you have never seen before. Oh well sorry to ramble on, but just some memories. As a tax payer I have never seen such an obscene waste in my life!

The military is also a practical entity. What they want is the cars gone. They're going to work with who can do that. Looks like the scrappers have been falling short. You see the pictures of a couple cars, they are toppled either by the wind or a real stupid scrap company. Didn't even unhook the brake rigging.

The way a museum gets these is by being more helpful to the base than a scrapper. They said to take them out in pieces. They said nothing about "more than three". This is a forklifts and dollies job. The military base is a hostile environment, get in, get out quick.

To be perhaps a bit fair about this, a major tornado DID sweep through the area a few years ago..... April 2002, to be exact. It was an F1 tornado when it came off the Potomac River as a waterspout through Indian Head, and worked its way up to F4 by the time it tore through nearby La Plata. It's not inconceivable that this is leftover tornado/windstorm damage.

http://www.nws.noaa.gov/os/assessments/pdfs/laplata.pdf