I am helping a colleague prepare a rough budget estimate for a project, and she'd like to know how much to allow for part of the project. This is still the early planning stages, so we don't quite know how it will turn out, or if this part of the project will happen at all. She is trying to figure out the workability of the idea. If things go as we hope, it may eventually include a partnership with a local railroad museum group that is, itself, working on getting some things established on the ground.



The organization she is working on behalf of is restoring a belt-driven, electric gristmill that operated from about 1900 through the early 1960s (and possibly later), and was served by the Western Maryland and the B&O. It will eventually be a museum dealing with regional agriculture and industry. They'd like to take the building back to its appearance as it was in the late 1930s, and park a period-appropriate boxcar next to one of the loading doors to help interpret the building's relationship to the adjacent (no longer active) railroad yard.

My initial thought for the boxcar was a PRR/W&LE/B&O X-29 or a B&O wagon top, but they'd like to avoid an all-steel car, since it will house exhibits and sit out in the summer sun, and climate control may not be an option.



For the sake of something that is still pretty hypothetical, I am going with a worse case scenario and assuming a composite, double sheathed car with steel ends, roof, and doors, converted for MOW service and left unused outdoors for the last 20-40 years. The following conditions might be typical of such a car: all of the wood siding and flooring would require replacement and 50-60 per cent of any wooden frame members in the walls would require replacement or reinforcement, end doorways cut into a pressed steel end would need to be patched, side door openings previously filled in opened back up and missing doors replaced.

I'm assuming a 40' car, which would require a length of panel track.

I'm also assuming that the boxcar is donated or purchased at negligible cost. All work would be done by volunteers, except some sheet metal fabrication, such as forming corrugated patches to be welded onto the ends and ground flush. Assume that the organization would not be able to procure donation of transportation, loading, or unloading, and the move would require a 600-mile haul by truck.



Can anyone put me in the right direction to form a rough cost estimate range? Cost would include installation of panel track, transportation, interior and exterior restoration and painting of the car. It would not include exhibit costs. Is the group's concerns about a steel car unfounded? What additional variables might I be leaving out?

Lastly, can anyone point me in the direction of any good boxcars that might be available for the job, or potential donors/suppliers thereof? I know wooden boxcars have gotten pretty scarce these days. Heritage is not important, though WM, B&O, C&O, or any central Appalachian road would be ideal. Again, suggestions are all that we need at this point. We still have some planning and development to do before we can go ahead and get a boxcar hauled in.



I know these are a lot questions to respond to in one post.....anyone respondant's patience and help will be duly appreciated.

I will forward any suggestions to the organization in question.

Thanks very much!

David A. Vago



Executive Director
Preservation Alliance of West Virginia
www.pawv.org

Chair, Cass Interpretive Program
Mountain State Railroad & Logging Historical Association
www.msrlha.org

David,

As far as an estimate, I can not offer you much. I can offer you place which has a L&N mellon car for sale. It is circa 1910. Friction bearings, needs complete new sheathing but the last time I saw it the frame looked to be ok.

This car owned by the Bluegrass Railroad Museum in Versailles KY. The last I heard the price was about 100 dollars. I have not visited the museum for some time and do not know if the car is still available. It does have the corregated ends as well as vents and I think that it has a wooded roof.

The Bluegrass Railroad Museum website is www.bgrm.org

The reason I know so much about this car is that there is a sister to it on the Morehead and North Fork Railroad. Before that it came from the Flemingsurg and Northern in Flemingsburg, KY. Before that, L&N.

Good luck on your project,

JD Johnson, Morehead and North Fork Railroad Historian

Their concerns about using a steel car are unfounded. Since the interior is going to be display space, rather than portraying an empty boxcar, it can always have a new insulated interior lining and ceiling installed, a job any compentent carpentry contractor can easily handle. The advantages of using a steel car are that it will be virtually bullet proof. Once patched and made watertight (assuming an older pre-WWII car that will have some rust problems along the floor line) maintenence will consist of nothing more than a scrape or spot sandblast every ten or fifteen years and a repaint and relettering. If stencils are saved, this is something that volunteers can handle, or can be jobbed out to a local painting contractor.

A wood car sitting out in the weather is a whole 'nother thing. The roofs are typically light gage sheet metal, or wood over an inner sheet metal roof. The former tend to leak; the later sprout mushrooms. If a double sheathed car, the siding is now a non standard item that will need to be custom milled. The 1x8 boards sold as "car siding" these days are 1) too wide, and 2) the wrong species to have any longevity. If a single sheathed car with an exposed steel frame, the re-sheathing work could be done with pressure treated lumber, although I don't know if CCA (Wolmanized) can be used for this type of project any longer. You will have trouble obtaining the 17' lengths needed to sheath a 40' car, and will end up with way more butt joints than you's like. Neither type of wood car will hold paint well; during the winter moisture from the climate controlled interior will permeate through the sheathing and cause the paint to blister within two or three years. Even cars at museums where the interior is not used as living space don't hold up well, and the car will need constant attention to not become an eyesore.

Also be cautious of acquiring a car missing the doors; the door hardware simply doesn't exist anymore. You need to find a car that has all its major components included.

Hi David - What Dennis said.

Also, given most boxcars were on other than home rails most of the time, is the actual heritage of the car important? If cost is a critical factor, you would be better off finding a car in good shape from any road, since restoration will cost a lot more than fair market value of a used obsolete boxcar.

I'd be looking for a car close to you in basically good condition no matter its provenance.

dave

David,

The boxcar mentioned by JD is under the Equipment tab on the left side of the Bluegrass Railroad Museum web page. Cliock on "Equipment", then "Freight Cars". The subject boxcar is the seventh photo down. Rough shape, yes, but the price is right and it appears to be intact. You cannot see if ends have been cut (hopefully not), but it does seem to match your scenario of needing substantial rebuild. Note that the sheathing is vertical, not horizontal. This still does not change what was said by Dennis and Dave, but if wood is what you want, this may be an excellent candidate.

If you listen to Dave and Dennis' arguments for the merits of a steel/metal box car, I can probably most assuredly find you a surplus metal B&O car somewhere "in my back yard" that is probably "free" for the acquisition (especially if you are less worried about pristine completeness and more worried about structural soundness), but you will have to deal with the costs of transport. It sounds to me like said project is in the Maryland or West Virginia area; the cars I have in mind are also in that area.

As an idea of costs, the Baltimore Streetcar Museum spent somewhere around $3,000 per streetcar (similar weight, size, etc.) to transport several PCCs from Philadelphia to Baltimore, mostly on Interstate 95. That, mind you, was an exceedingly "friendly" rate from a fellow preservationist who had the trailer, and as the cars were able to roll right on and off the trailer under their own power there were no cranes involved. Figure in your case that you will need at least one crane at each end (anywhere from $100 to several hundred dollars an hour, unless you get a friendly nonprofit rate or donation of services). Remember the costs of permits, etc. for an "oversized" load--and multiply by the states involved.

One other thing to consider: Some museums or foundations are explicitly forbidden by certain charters, covenants, standards, etc. from selling or otherwise "deaccessioning" an artifact. Whether they like it or not, the only option might be a trade of basically equivalent assets, provided you have or can conjure up some items or services that they can use. To that end, does your client have anything to offer, or can they find something to offer? (Say, in this case, can they acquire a different rail car and trade it? Or maybe some foundry work? Or custom-cut timber? Use your imagination.......)

Almost impossible to give an estimate with so many unknowns. Probably the best bet is to select your candidate and then start pricing from there.

Volunteer labor sounds good but it can take a LONG time to redo one car and make it weatherproof. There are always items not suited to the skillbase of available volunteers or to the tools/workspace at hand. If you wanted to do the car in as LITTLE as a year, the best bet would be to move it to a temporary lodging in some sort of covered space and you will find an equipped workshop area handy since undoubtedly more than hand tools will be needed.

Very wild estimates - Track at $150 per linear foot; transportation $5K-7K; car restoration at $18K-40K

I would bet ther are museums that would be willing to meet you and discuss some of these issues, complete with examples of car work in process, so you can get a better understanding of these tasks. One thing for sure, as soon as you start one part of it, the project will grow and grow as you uncover one thing after another that needs fixing.

Bob Kutella

.

Kelly,

You guys do nice work. Seeing the photo of the Rutland car was a surprise; very familiar since I did the patterns and offered an HO scale model of the same car a number of years ago. I see you guys couldn’t resist applying the “Whippet” slogan either. I included it on my decals even though research seemed to show it was only ever applied to very few cars.

Back to the discussion at hand. I formulated my position based on the fact that these don’t appear to be professional restorationists; the work will likely have to be jobbed out to local contractors who will have little idea as to the best materials and methods to use, and when completed will have no budget for continued maintenance beyond the building maintenance budget. They will plan on getting a building, not an artifact that will need to be restored over and over again.

If I may ask, what did you use for car siding? Custom milled Doug Fir? What did you use for paint, as much of what I see being used these days peels almost before it fades. What sort of prep did you do on the outside metal roof, and did you need to fabricate any replacement parts?

Bobs estimates are not far off on a wood car. We have restored a Frisco wood caboose and the curent price tag for materials and labor is at $36,000.00. This includes a value for donated labor. The transportation costs are more like $6.00 a loaded mile for tractor trailer and $1,500.00 at each end to load and unload with a crane. The panel track will run about a $150.00 per ft with relay ties and used rail and OTM.

Please feel free to contact me I am working on a budget for a flat car and two steel 40' box cars at the present time.

.

Thank you all for your helpful responses. I had considered the L&N boxcar as a prospect. It's just about the era we'd be looking for, and it needs a good home. However, it does, as several have pointed out, need a good deal of work.

The main purpose in estimating the cost is for a grant application, so rough numbers (with a lot of variables and a good Murphy's law cushion) are about the best we can hope for at this point.

Building an insulated stud wall or other lining inside a steel car is an option that we had discussed, and may yet still come to pass, but we'd rather have an authentic, if not original, interior. We may also end up with a second car, so that one can be used as a traveling exhibit and one as stationary. This would enable us to have both.

Over the weekend, myself and a few of the people involved with the mill project were able to speak with some of the persons involved with the West Virginia Railroad Museum, which as most of you probably know is involved in an effort to open a museum facility on the adjacent railroad yard site. If we can work with them, we'll be able to get more concrete numbers for, and help with, the track work, transportation, etc.

Needless to say, then, the mill is in Elkins, West Virginia. It's a joint effort on the part of a number of organizations, but spearheaded by a local economic development nonprofit. Most of the milling machinery is gone, however, a few pieces remain. I have not inventoried what they are. It will eventually be the visitors' center, museum and working headquarters for the Appalachian Forest Heritage Area, a multi-county preservation, interpretation, and tourism coordination effort.

The mill appears in a number of photos that RyPn readers may be familiar with. The first time I saw it, I was rather surprised to recognize it from a photo in a book I've had since I was 3 or 4. In Don Ball's Portrait of the Rails, there is a photo of a WM 2-8-0 entering the Elkins yard from the steel truss bridge at the south end of the yard. It's the building on the left. Just about any photo you'll see of the bridge shows the mill.

David,

I'm going to take off my railroad hat for a bit, and speak from my experiences as a carpenter. The problem you face with an un-insulated steel roof is not so much heat (although that will be a consideration) but condensation during the cold months. I assume that if this is display space, then it will accessible from the rest of the building interior through the loading door. This essentially makes it part of the building interior space, which you will be heating at least some of the time during the winter. Heating cold air allows it to carry more moisture, which it will absorb from the contents of the building, such as people. This drying effect of heated interiors is why we tend to humidify heated spaces, but even without adding extra humidity, the air within the building will have more humidity than it can hold at a colder temperature. When this humid air comes in contact with the exposed cold steel of the roof, the moisture will condense out, just like cold windows sweat, and drip on the displays. The only sure way to prevent this is to put an insulated lining under the roof, to keep the cold away from the inside air, equipped with a vapor barrier to keep the moisture out of the insulation so it can't condense and ruin its insulating value. The railroads didn't have this problem because they didn't heat the interiors of their boxcars; they were filled with the same cold dry air as was outside.

The reason I bring this up is that there were two different roofing systems common on wood boxcars. The Rutland car that Kelly posted a photo of was built in 1924, IIRC, and was a rather late application of what was called an "outside metal roof". This was thin gage sheet metal over a wood roof. The wood shows on the inside. However, by the late twenties all steel roofs were available from several vendors, and The L&N car at the Bluegrass Railroad Museum appears to have a Hutchins "Dry Lading" roof, which is of the all steel type. This truly is all steel, with the underside of the steel panels exposed to the inside, and so in this respect is no different from an all steel car. If your intention is to obtain a wood car simply to have the insulating value of the wood sheathing (which may not be sufficient) then you need to look carefully at the type of roof the wood car has.

Kelly,

I have to chuckle about your Honduran mahogany boxcar. It reminds me if all those restored Mustangs that have lavish seven coat hand rubbed finishes, when all they had was the typical factory "dip job" when they were new.

No one in a million years would have guessed that Strasburg was buying mahogany to put on boxcars, but I agree that it's an excellent choice; very rot resistant, stable, and because of that holds paint extremely well. When the cost of labor becomes the major cost of the job, it becomes well worthwhile to move to more expensive materials if they will prevent having to redo the work as often.

Which brings me to my point. For some reason, most people seem to think that railroad equipment is made of stone; put it in a park like a monument and it will last forever. Even people who wouldn't think of displaying a buggy or automobile outside in the weather year round seem to view railroad cars as buildings. Nothing is further from the truth, of course, as is evidenced by all those caboose shaped compost heaps that keep coming up on e-bay. The goal of most railroad museums (I realize that Strasburg is not a museum, even if it does better restoration work than some) is to get restored equipment under a roof, so they don't have to keep redoing the same work again and again.

When someone comes up with a proposal for a display that dictates that the railroad car be outdoors forever, they really need to understand what they are getting themselves into. I seem to recall reading that the average time between repaintings for the Pacific Fruit Express wood reefer fleet was something like only six or seven years, and that by twenty five years of age the cars were receiving total rebuildings. And, these were cars that were constantly moving, getting the standing water and accumulated leaves blown out of the nooks and crannies. Can we really expect much longer life from an out door railroad display? Can this grist mill museum really be expected to budget money for a total rebuild every twenty or thirty years, or will the car just become an eyesore and be scrapped? Given that the era they wish to portray gives them the choice of using either a wood car or a steel car, they should at least be aware of the pros and cons before they make the choice.