Hi folks. I'm looking for more info on this narrow gauge boxcar that currently lives at the Dupont/Hagley Museum. I'd love a source of drawings or blueprints.

Thanks!

CSC

Did you ask anyone at Hagley? They have an amazing amount of records preserved.

Yep, that was my first call. Still waiting to hear back.

Thanks

It is hard to see the trucks in the photos, so I have no comments on them. But the rest of it does not look like it is original from anything. The railings look to be pipes assembled with pipe fittings. The safety appliances do not look forged. Hard to imagine a wooden freight car with out truss rods. It may have been an attempt to copy something in a photo, do not know, but I do not think anything on the car body is old.

Looks a lot like the Dynamite Train train at DuPont WA. The boxcar is shorter in length, but the general style is very similar.

One distinctive feature is that the railings are indeed made of pipe.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTTRq9rPTbQ

Here's the boxcar in Dupont, WA. Behind it you can see one of the flatcars with the pipe railing ends. This boxcar isn't outside braced, but the general style is similar.

The plot thickens...

Builders photo from Jackson & Sharp.

Hmmm...

Chris

Well, it looks like Chris found at least part of his answer.

The car in the Jackson & Sharp photo is very close to the one in the museum. About the only differences I can spot are a slightly different bolting arrangement at the bottom of the car, a different pattern for the doors, the lack of handles for the doors on the museum car, the lack of a step for the doors in the builder's photo (which could have been added later), and what appear to be roller-bearing arch bar trucks in the J&S photo!

Overall the car looks like something that would be built for industrial service or perhaps an export order; some of those things would look rather unusual to most of us. As to the lack of truss rods, if the center sills are big enough, and the length short enough, you may not need them. There were plenty of 19th century box cars that were quite short and didn't need them as well.

What jumped out at me was archbar trucks with what look like early roller beatings. Quite the anachronism-

Probably the 1927 order was an up-dated copy of an older design for one of the power works railways that DuPont operated. Probably the existing railway and buildings dictated the size and other features.

Could the roller bearings have been a special requirement to eliminate the possibility of hot boxes in cars carrying dynamite?