Hello All,

The Bluegrass Railroad Museum has recently received a kind donation, from the Kentucky Utilities Company, of a 1940 built, 55 ton capacity, Norfolk and Western Railway flatcar. It will compliment our N&W GP9 and our N&W plug door boxcar.


We've noticed some wooden boards within the truck springs. Each set of springs has two or three boards there at the top. Is there a name for these? What is the purpose of them? They appear to be worn out, how urgent is it to replace them?



I ran a simple search of this forum for information; but nothing turned up.

Thank you for any help,

James Hinman

James -

Great news on the donation of N&W #202507 to the BGRM. Really a nice addition to your roster. Do you happen to know if this flat is an original Norfolk & Western car or if it might have come from the Virginian, Nickel Plate Road, Wabash, or one of the other merged lines?

Hope you get an knowledgeable answer on the wood truck plank.

Les

The wood in there is most likely just a shim to level or raise the car. The coupler height on an empty freight car should be between 32 1/2 and 34 1/2 as measured at the CENTER of the coupler knuckle and ideally there should be 1/4 of side bearing clearance on all four corners of a roller type side bearing. If the design of the truck allows there to be no shim and you can stand to be without them from a coupler height standpoint then you could just remove them. You can also replace them with steel. Once in a blue moon I still see wooden shims in freight car trucks. Most of the time we do not use shims at all. If a car does not sit level without the use of shims then you probably have spring problems or uneven wear problems or a twisted frame. You can also shim in the center plate to gain coupler height if you can maintain center plate engagement.

Greetings:
A pretty common repair.
I would suggest replacing them with new white oak, cut to the same size as the originals or thicker if the coupler height of the car is too low as mentioned above.
Steel could be used, but: 1) it would not be an "authentic" repair for your car (obviously), 2) the steel would have to be secured somehow to keep it in place (the wood would not) and 3) steel is more expensive than white oak and not as easily modified to fit.
Good luck!
J.David

Hayneshopcat and J. David,

Thank you both for your responses. We haven't measured the coupler height yet, but that will tell the tale, I suppose.

Les,

It's an original N&W car. N&W is stamped all over the car, stake pockets, trucks, all over. A 5 digit number, 80648, is stenciled on at least one of the bolsters.

We presume that the 80648 number is the original car number, and that the car was renumbered with 202507 after the 1964 mergers.

James

What is that round feature midway along the length of the board? Is that the end of a steel tie rod that passes through multiple boards?

It looks like there is separating joint there in the wood, but I cannot tell if that is what it is for sure.

Is it only the friction of the car weight squeezing on the wood that keeps it in place?

Can't comment about what looks to be a saw cut, but it appears that the wood shim is H shaped; look at the near corner and you'll see it is wider than the slot the slot in the sideframe the bolster rides in. I suspect the rusty thing in the middle is a long rivet to keep the wood from splitting and falling out.

Come to think of it, I don't think I've ever seen shims inserted with the grain parallel to the rails; they normally show the end grain to the outside of the truck. In that orientation a split shim could be contained by the sideframe, and would have to move an awful long way to fall out.

I'd just jack the truck and inspect the shim for rot. If OK, just slop some oil on it for additional waterproofing. If decay has set in, replace in kind, using white oak.

I went out to the RRM of PA today for a look see. I did notice several wheel sets with wood blocking on freight cars and some lone trucks. Interesting that the wood blocks were for the most part "grain out" and a close look at one wheel set showed some type of "cut" to fit the springs as well as a keeper.
Just thought I would drop this into the discussion.

I'll try to look more closely at the planks for specific shapes cut into them.

The generating station which this came from runs on barge coal. There is very little railroad trackage onsite. This car, and a 45 ton GE switcher, were used on a single spur, running heavy equipment into the building. The spur is a curve. It's possible that it was loaded to capacity or over, and the planks suffered.

The switcher and this flatcar can be seen in some Google and Bing aerial images. More recently than those images, the flatcar and trucks were hauled to a lay down area on the far side of the considerable coal pile. If you peruse the aerial images, you'll see a small cemetery between the coal pile and the river. The flatcar was adjacent to that cemetery when we were allowed to inspect it last summer. The flatcar was laid directly on the ground, with one set of trucks on the deck of it, and the other set next to the flatcar, on the ground. If there's anything out of order with the trucks, then it possibly happened when the flatcar was moved from the plant siding, to the field. We looked at them later, but may have missed something.

We had inquired about the switcher, as it is a sibling to our current 45 ton GE switcher, also of KU ancestry. Ghent wanted to keep theirs as a display, and offered the flatcar instead.

Thank you all for your input.

James Hinman

It's just amazing what one can find on the internet these days. This drawing may be useful:

https://www.nwhs.org/archivesdb/detail.php?ID=91175

Unfortunately, no thumbnail view, so we can't see exactly what it is, but for five bucks plus shipping, it might be worth ordering a copy just to see what it is. It might also be worthwhile to see what else they have that pertains to that specific car.

What Dennis said. I've replaced and installed dozens of these.