Canada's Grain Boxcars
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- čas přidán 22. 04. 2022
- Agricultural products like grain were previously moved on the railroad utilizing boxcars. Special wood, cardboard, or paper "grain doors" would be used behind the main door to keep the product from spilling out. Come the 1960s and 70s though, and American railroads began to switchover to larger hopper cars that could hold more product and were much easier to unload using chutes on the car. However, in Canada, things were changing at a slower pace. Canadian National and Canadian Pacific were refurbishing their grain boxcars while their American counterparts were switching to hoppers. In this video, I take a brief look at the history of Canada's grain boxcars and how long they truly lasted as hoppers slowly took over on Canada's railways.
Special thanks to Eric Gagnon for allowing use of his photos and for his articles about CN/CP Rail's grain boxcars!
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"Can we have covered hoppers?"
"we have covered hoppers at home"
Covered hoppers at home:
Loving these little snippets of railcar history
Objectively it’s an outdated practice, but like steam locomotives and old cars there’s a weird but irresistible industrial charm to it.
From what I read about the one on display in the Canadian Railway Museum in Montreal, another reason CN and CP liked the Grain boxcars is because they could be used to ship things in both directions: grain to ports, and manufactured goods from ports.
Until maybe 1960s. This wasn't a thing when I was growing up. We did ship a lot of grain in box cars - though I only ever loaded into the cylindrical bulk cars when we were able to start loading our own cars in the early 90s.
That's definitely one of the reasons why boxcars were used for grain as long as they were, in spite of the fact that covered hoppers had been around for quite some time for hauling certain products. Railroads at that time did not want to purchase cars that were all specialized, and could not be used for moving other cargo. They still don't like it. Tank cars were a good example of that. Railroads did want want to buy them for one way hauls, or not to be able to use them for something else if that business went away. So you had businesses that needed them and leasing companies buy them, and customers would pay to use them.
That argument hasn't applied for decades. Through the 1970s and early 1980s, basically all goods that might have been loaded into a box car at a port moved into containers.
@@beeble2003 Oh absolutely; grain boxcars have been out of use for decades for a reason. But it’s part of why they stuck around for slightly longer in Canada.
@@casey6556 Unless you're saying that Canadian port traffic too 15+ years longer to containerize than every other developed country, this reason just doesn't hold water. By the mid 1980s, there was basically no hope of being able to load a grain box car with anything on its way out of the port, yet CN and CP continued to refurbish grain box cars at that time, and continued to use them for another decade.
I never know that Grain Boxcars existed in Canada. Pretty cool history of these kinds of Boxcars. They are all pretty amazing and the history too. It is a shame that probably most of them are gone.
I mean tbh the hoppers probably spill just as much!
There's one preserved in Revelstoke, BC at the railway museum there
@@CANControlGRAFFITI The hoppers don't rust out like the boxcars did. As long as the unloading chutes are properly maintained, there's very little chance of leakage.
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They are going to tax you out of your car with $10 a litre gas and force you to live in their smart cities, when will you say ENOUGH?!
The whole idea is to print money till they destroy people's savings through low interest and high inflation and collapse the dollar and bring in a one world digital currency, add to that more crushing debt for our grand kids to never be able to pay off.
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An evil enemy will burn his own nation to the ground to rule over the ashes.' - Sun Tzu
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The bankers will ensure we stay in debt. The pharmaceutical companies will ensure we stay sick. The weapons manufacturers will ensure we keep going to war. The media will ensure we are prevented from knowing the truth. The government will ensure that all of this is done legally.
I actually live in Canada and remembered seeing the hopper cars go by my grandparents farm in rural Mantoba. One day when I was a kid I was outside with my grandpa and saw the box cars mixed in with the hoppers. He worked maintenance on the railroad decades before I was born. I asked him what the box cars were as I had never seen a box car before. He explained what they where to me and that started my life long fascination with all things railroad. This video reminded me of my grandpa he passed a few months ago miss you gramps.
I model steam to diesel era for a lot of railroads and now I know why there's no companies out there that make Canadian Pacific and Canadian national covered Hoppers that fit the steam to diesel era thanks for sharing this
Research "Crow Rate" (Crowsnest Freight Rate), a 1897 agreement between Canada and CP holding grain rates at basically their 1897 level "forever" that provided zero economic incentive for CP to spend a dime on rolling stock or track on grain lines. The Agreement was terminated in 1995. Boxcars had friction bearing which were being phased out and would often trigger wayside mechanical detectors, stopping a train for inspection. Boxcar payload was limited to about 50 tons when covered hoppers could do 100 tons. Rail carriers went to per car rates vs weight based rates that required scales and the need to weigh cars, so quickest way to reduce your freight rate was get more product in the car.
wow i seen crow rate and i figured this was going a different way. glad you brought the economic disincentive.... good riddance
Even now though, CN and CP are supposed to be buying their own hoppers to replace the first generation of Government if Canada hopper cars. They aren’t. They are running the crap out of the Government and provincial cars, while their own sit on sidings. The revenue cap doesn’t help this, but they still have the ability to make the investment, but they are keeping it very minimal. I know car rejection numbers were up at terminals again this winter.
Some of the footage in this is from a wonderful short National Film Board documentary called "Grain Elevator", directed by Charles Konowal in 1981. It shows not only how these boxcars were loaded, but also the inner workings of a classic wooden grain elevator. The film is on CZcams under the NFB channel. Definitely worth a look!
I went to work for Southern Railway in 1979, and at that time they had fleet of old 40’ friction bearing boxcars that they called “doorless wonders”. Rather than put new doors on those old cars when they fell off, they just removed the remaining door and used them to haul agricultural limestone. They’d pile it in both ends of the car but leave the center part empty. They spent their remaining years in this inglorious service, and typically weren’t declared dead until a loader fell through the rotted wooden floor! On the subject of Canadian rr’s, I always thought it was neat that CN cars always had two different spellings of “Canadian” on them. The “L” side of the car would read “Canadian National”, but the “R” side was “Canadien National”. Not sure if they still do that. I retired in 2020 so I’m not around this stuff anymore!
Canadien Nacional is the Quebecois French name for Canadian National and is used on CN's bilingual routes in Quebec and Ontario.
In Milwaukee you always knew what Freight cars were near the end of their careers when they were assigned to hauling hides to a leather firm. The grease and chemicals and salt was like instant corrosion plus the stench
@@paulbergen9114 Southern still had a few of those in service when I started! 40’ boxcars, in sub-terrible condition, and stenciled “For Tankage Loading Only”. I always felt like the stencils were supposed to say “Tannage” instead of Tankage, given that the hides were going to be tanned. So much has changed since then!
For five years, while I was in high school, I worked for a local lumber yard. Dunlap's Home Improvement Centers, In Columbus Indiana. We received carloads of cedar and redwood in forty footers. Often the cars had wheat kernels still in them.
Grain had been leaking out from the grain cars for a very long time . My neighbour told me stories of the previous owner of my house going to the CP Southside
Yard ( Edmonton / Strathcona ) and bringing home sacks of grain to feed the pheasants . He and the wife had separated , she lived upstairs and he lived downstairs in the dugout basement next to the furnace . Thnx for a wonderful story !
A very interesting video about the use of boxcars for bulk grain I recall probably 15 years ago being in the Alamosa Monte Vista area of Southern Colorado and seeing bulk potatoes being loaded into box cars. Here in Australia right up.to the early 1960s a lot of grain especially wheat was moved in bags and then later in bulk in 4 wheel wagons and later 8 wheel 4 axle wagons . A lot of grain is moved for export by rail in bulk and to some destinations in 20ft containers In my state NSW i have never seen grain sent in box cars but i have seen it in South Australia.. Once again a very informative article .Best wishes from Sydney Australia .
Ha! Some of those grain boxcars on the CN were "hiding" in Hearst, ON. They had a ton of old 40' boxcars on a siding there, and there was a number of them that had the wheat logo on them. Then in the late 90s, they began to disappear bit by bit, until they were gone.
in 1991~92, I unloaded hundreds and hundreds of loads of wood chips from those old CN & CP grain Boxcars at my former paper mill in Red Rock Ont. I've seen them turned into sheds after. Nice to see pics of my city Thunder Bay.
Sadly now out of business but Consolidated papers in Wisconsin Rapids WI hauled special spruce wood chips all the way from South Dakota in 40 ft former CNW cars and after they were retired they used former Chicago Great Western 50 foot box cars with those paper doors bulging out
Thank you for this history. I didn't know that the cylindrical cars were gone.
Worked at an IL grain co. for 31 years, starting in 1973. The last box cars went out in 1971.We had tons of the cardboard sheets left when I came. Pretty tough to recycle because every one had several steel straps running through it for reinforcement. Handy around the shop though.
In a late-70s coffee table book on CN, there's a bit in the "advanced tech" chapter about an automated chopper for the wooden or cardboard grain doors.
We had an old fashioned system , where we started a fire a ways down from the Grain Elevator and piled the grain doors on the fire . They burned well . Thank God we didn't get caught !
Australian National had a simillar concept, "AHDL" wagons where they were converted to be hoppers. They also tried specialised grain containers to allow container trains to haul grain, and to stack the containers when not needed (they also used this idea for livestock crates) however these ideas never lasted. The AHDL were another example of stopgap measures becoming long term pains.
Nice video, brought back some memories for me. My first "Real Job" was working in a grain mill in southern California in the 70's. Most of our grain arrived by covered hopper but every once in a while a box car load would come in. We had a scoop and cable system for unloading the grain, but in the end it was broom, shovel and a lot of sweat! Thanks for the video.
Grandpa worked for several elevators along the Mississippi River into the 90s and he remembered dealing with boxcars with grain in them into the 80s. Never mentioned if they were grain specific but did mention they were a pain to empty as they had to shovel it out of the cars by hand.
I worked with some older gentlemen which used to work for the local grain pool elevator and they told many stories about those old box cars. They used to keep a pile of crappy lumber by the loading area to replace pieces of the grain door they forgot to send back with the car when it was unloaded along with a mountain of rags to plug all the holes.
It's so funny thinking how in the Midwest the 40 foot box car was still King because Milwaukee Road Northwestern and SOO Line all had major rebuilding programs for them in the early seventies. The 🎥 also brought back memories of the stacks of wooden grain doors left by the Northwestern for that purpose near a malt plant here in Milwaukee and now they're tearing down the last one which surprisingly still had the boxcar dumper in one of the sheds
Brazil had a similar thing going on, by the mid-1970s the Mato Grosso State along with the Alta Paulista and Triangulo Mineiro regions of São Paulo and Minas Gerais experienced a boom in agricultural production to deal with the increasing demand for shippemnts of grain (soy, corn and sugar) heading to the port of Santos for export the FEPASA (State of São Paulo RWY) started a big plan to convert many of its old 1930s and 1950s vintage mail, dry goods and reefer box cars into the HFR and FHR series box hoppers, HFR being the SIGO designation for Hopper, Fechado (subtype designator meaning Enclosed, basically any hopper car that has a roof), R = Total weight of no more than 80 metric tons, commonly box hoppers of the HFR type would have their doors plated and welded shut leaving only a swallow depression with its shape, now FHR is SIGO for Fechado (Box car), Hopper (subtype of boxcars with chutes), R = Total weight of no more than 80 metric tons, the FHR series kept the doors on the sides hence their classification as box cars and not hoppers. The FEPASA shops would adapt between 8 and 16 chutes on these cars, they would also adapt "plug" doors into them, meaning the the doors had a rubber seal and the closing mechanism that pressed the doors tightly agains their frame preventing leaks and dispensing the usage of "grain doors" like american and canadian railroads. These cars entered service by the mid 1970s, their robust design kept them a common sight in "export corridor" up until the middle 2010s when the last survivors were replaced by more modern covered hoppers on the now privatized former-FEPASA tracks, it was not uncommon to see these cars being pulled by state-of-the-art C44-9WM's of Ferronorte and Brasil Ferrovias or the C30-7A Cutrale Quintellas, the workhorses of FEPASA's and later FERROBAN's broad gauge lines, or by the Scrap30s, nickname give to the hundreds of former NA railroad C30-7s that arrived here in the early 2000s. Box hoppers also proliferated on metric and broad gauge lines of the Federal Railway Network, the RFFSA, most notably on their broad gauge lines in São Paulo were the former RFFSA FHS's (F = Box, H = Hopper, S = Total weight of no more than 100 metric tons) still run to this day carrying sugar and soy to the port of Santos and fertilizer on the way back to the countryside. In my opinion the period between 1985 and 2015 was the most colourful period in the history of Brazilian Railroads.
This was interesting read! Don't hear so much about S. American railroad systems when living in the US. Thanks for sharing!
@@DK-nv9zu No problem!
Wow! Lots of interesting information about Brazilian Railroading!
I used to go to Sao Jose dos Campos and Sao Paolo for work. I loved the experience!
Thank you for sharing all of that!
As a Canadian I love this bit of history
Here in Indiana USA I live by a company that made all kinds of animal food .When we first moved here they used the grain boxcars to bring in grain.To move the cars into position they had a cable system then a arm that removed the barrier
Spent many a sweaty hour shoveling grain in those as a kid. They made some great shops and barns when retired!
It's possible to see some of those former Canadian government cylindrical grain cars on freight trains in the US. They have different reporting marks, but they're still earning their keep.
Hi, just happened to see your video, which I find intriguing because I see these cylindrical everyday when I'm heading home from work. When I first saw them they were we're bright and shiny no graffiti on board. Now they are showing their age but I still take many many photographs of them. It's very educational for me because I model these particular route in O gauge. Great history for me. Thanks again
I remember seeing about a half dozen of the grain boxcars on a siding at the now gone UGG elevator on the Letellier sub in Winnipeg. They were there for as long as I could remember until I moved out of the area and that was in 1998. Not sure when they were finally pulled out of there but it would have been around the time that the grain elevator there was torn down in the early 2000's.
I remember seeing old Northern Pacific 40 ' ice reefer cars being used in grain service in the early 1980's the hinged doors were removed and wood grain doors would be installed.
The model they are inspecting near the end of the video is the original cylindrical hopper car, the "tank hopper" as originally built by Alcan and NSC. CN, as is their wont, got a 70-ton car (3000cf). CP used a slightly larger 100-ton car (3400cf). These predate the ACF Centerflow by about 5 years (with the first order built in 1959).
Sant John, New Brunswick was also a major grain poret until the 1980s, it is an ice free winter port on the Bay of Fundy that at it's peak had grain elevators for both CN and CP.
I'd like more info on this and pics if possible. My wife's family were from the Saint John area. I married into the family in the early 70's before I had an interest in railroading.
i knew they were used well into the 80's. didn't know they were used into the 90's till i watched this video. as im typing my wife said she remembers her dad filling box cars with grain in the mid 90's.
It's funny I remember seeing another video not long ago from a railway museum in Michigan that talked about a car that could be a grain hopper or a boxcar, of which the museum has one of the few remaining. The idea being that you can haul arbitrary cargo in them in box car mode on the return trip from where you dropped off the grain. They treated it like it was an innovation that failed and eventually went out of service, so I guess it must have been some kind of refinement on the just block the door and fill the car with grain idea.
Sounds familiar I wonder if that was the 50 Foot plug door box car that also have roof hatches. I believe there are only two of them and the one I remember was BC Rail green with their Herald and also the Milwaukee Road Herald
Wild that they lasted until the late 90s, BN had shut down all their branch lines that couldn't handle hoppers by the mid to late 80s.
The boxcars could be ordered by farmers to sit at a siding near them, where they would load them directly, sidestepping the grain elevator. Like the boxcars, most of the grain elevators and many of the branch lines are gone (or used to store unused railcars.).
We had a CN branch line that ended at my town and didn’t continue past. Had 3 elevators and remember some boxcars being spotted there mixed with hopper cars in the late 80s early 90s. Our rail was fairly heavy rail so could handle a 90 ton hopper car fully loaded and boxcars were rare by the early 90s. I’ve heard stories of grain elevator guys smashing holes into the floor or side so they could reject them and just load the hopper cars as they were quicker and easier to load.
Terrific video, thanks for uploading this!
This gives me a reson now to run 40's on my 70 to 80's erra layout now. Lol
one of my earlier jobs in life was working at a pulse plant. we loaded box cars with bagged lentils etc for export. Not sure why they were sent that way when you would think a bulk hopper car would be the best way to ship them. Wore out some good boots doing that work!
very nice bit of Canadian history and the RR's. ty
Another new thing I’ve never learned 😁
Great video 👍
I never knew that Mario music is this calm.
It still makes you want to hit bricks with your head and stomp on turtles though.
Neat! I have an N-Scale CNR grain boxcar.
Nice job! Very informational
1:42 to 1:43 Good attention to detail...it's a photo of the CPR docks in Vancouver from the late 70s to early 80s (the exact time period being discussed)...although the grain elevators are located elsewhere in the harbour, several miles to the east, behind the photographer.
I remember seeing my share of those buffalos boxcars in The Pas. CN stored some of their cars at a siding north of The Pas.
Its interesting to hear that the CN/CP car shortages are nothing new. Quite a few elevators are still waiting for cars from last year in the states from CN and CP.
Come to think of it, I don't really know why, as they aren't moving a whole lot of anything else currently.
Nice historical content 👍
I was today years old when i found out that Canadian railways used vans to ship grain
The paper "grain doors" where embedded with steel strapping to hold the weight of the load and due to the heavy staples used to secure them where a pain to remove once the boxcar ws returned to regular service. But not only grain boxcars were used for grain. Regular boxcars would be fitted with the grain doors and pressed into grain service at least in the early to mid 80's as the covered hoppers where used for other freight in the grain off season.
…plastic pellets, perhaps?
@@sammolloy1 Yep as well as sand and grit for making shingles, Potash, just about anything granular.
Nice work
I remember due to a car shortage and increased grain shipping demand in the 80's and early 90's CN and CP stated to buy or lease alot of covered hopers from the U.S. alot of which are still in service on CNR and CP.
Could you do some video on historical railroads that are lesser known? Such as the Catskill Mountain Railroad modern standard gauge and old 3ft.
Excellent 💯
I remember the DM&E using there boxcars to haul wood chips using this same method. I have videos of it on my channel.
Did you even film the loading?
@@antonberglund117 No, just passing by. You can see them in the DM&E Time Capsule videos.
@@Trainiac Oh, do you have an timestamp where they come up?😊
Thanks for another great video bro. Really appreciate your content. The use of the Grand Trunk hopper for the example melted my heart. Still waiting on a GTW video from you but I know you can't rush perfection right..... Right!?!🤣 Anyways another cool car video idea would be the 86' High Cube Auto parts cars. The must have been rear in places out side of Michigan, because was running a few at our clubs Open House today in Blissfield MI and had several people comment on them. Even had one older gentlemen go as far as to tell me that I shouldn't run them because there not "prototypical" and never existed, 🤔 I sure seen a bunch as a kid in the early 90s near Flint.
Sorry for the long-winded comment take care bro
Freddy.
I really do miss those High cubes and here in Milwaukee they don't pass through anymore ever since the Ford plant closed. Today there are so few left as many manufacturers have their plants across the street or within easy truck driving distance. Many were like advertising billboards especially Southern Pacific and Santa Fe even the Milwaukee Road had variations as they had large lettering when delivered in Brown then later some got repainted yellow and then some got back to brown paint with just a small Herald. There is also one or two 🎥 on CZcams showing about seven or eight different paint schemes still lettered for the old owners hauling baled peat moss in Canada. Oddest cars I remember were possibly marked AMPX which I think was Amoco Plastics which had a plant in Chippewa Falls WI and made styrofoam food containers. No weight to them just bulky and the only non- automobile use I had ever seen for those cars which I believe were bought new and probably gone by the early 80s. Best small fleets included Ann Arbor and Western Pacific. Most unique paint scheme was the purple Detroit Toledo and Ironton. You can check out current videos by Tie Spiker Productions shot in Central Indiana and some trains have up to 15 of them in a row which is impressive
Boxcars, hoppers or whatever, Canada's grain industry is awesome and the railways are a big reason why
They used vans (UK for box cars) to move grain in the UK before switching to covered hopper wagons. Those vans used paper to seal the doors.
back in the late 60's c&nw use grain box cars in Tracy Minnesota.
I grew up in rural Appalachia during the late 1960s and 1970s. I tried to remember the first time I saw a covered hopper. At the time I was a kid, there was a great deal of corn (maize) and sorghum being grown and shipped out of the Teays Valley area and I am pretty sure that in that area, at least, the Penn Central (later Conrail) and the Chesapeake & Ohio (later CSX) were both using open hoppers and gondolas topped with (often poorly affixed) tarpaulins, rather than true covered hoppers for grain haulage, well into the late 1970s, possibly even into the early 1980s. So, as far as I can tell, the Canadian railways were not unique in being slow to upgrade their rolling stock, they just used boxcars instead of rusted out open hoppers no longer fit to haul coal. :D
Chessie System was notoriously known for their “Triple X” hoppers, old 50 Ton hoppers that had fallen out of regular maintenance and still had friction bearings (I think) and because of that were deemed not safe to interchange (hence the large yellow Xs on the cars) they continued to haul coal, taconite pellets and I’m sure grain not sure when they disappeared but the 1970s and 1980s would’ve been the era when they were operating on Chessie trackage, basically it was an effort for the railroad to get the last bit of good out of their rolling stock before taking it to the breakers
@@loganbaileysfunwithtrains606 I recall the Xs on the sides of the open hoppers. They were plentiful in consists on the line between Huntington WV and Charleston WV, and you're right about the friction bearings. They made an almighty racket as trains picked up speed on the downward grade either side of he hump at Culloden WV. I even recall seeing a few hot boxes and quite a few seized axles showering sparks as the wheel skidded along the rail.
@@kitchentroll5868 from some pictures I’ve seen a lot of yard still had journal oil tanks up until the around the 1980s quite surprising they took the time to at least partially service those cars from time to time and I’d say the down fall for them was the bearings burning out while OTR, something charming out Chessie was them using their eclectic fleet of equipment well past its retirement something they seemly did often as my dad said he recalls seeing some Virginian marked hoppers on a few trains. Of course the Virginian was bought out by the N&W but I have no proof to disprove what he said but I’m sure Chessie just took out anything that could still roll down the track to use
@@loganbaileysfunwithtrains606 Well into the 1990s, in the Huntington WV yard, you could still see hoppers with barely legible markings for B&O, C&O, Western Maryland, Seaboard Coast Line, Clinchfield, L&N, N&W, and the rare Virginian. I even remember the occasional Erie, Pennsylvania, and New York Central hopper creaking its way through the Huntington yard. All of them dull and well rusted. Even now, you occasionally can catch sight of a consist of old rolling stock obviously on its way to the breakers. Although now defunct, Weiler Steel in Huntington used to have a scrap yard that featured gondolas of long defunct lines that were used to move scrap around. One of the gondolas was from New York, New Haven and Hartford, another was still readable as coming from Lehigh Valley over-painted with Reading at some long ago point.
@@kitchentroll5868 your comments about worn out old Freight cars that had an extension on life remind me of a few that I've seen over the years. In the mid-1960s the Milwaukee Road took the tops off old stock cars and use them to little Coke here in Milwaukee at Milwaukee Solvay Coke. Illinois Wisconsin Sand and Gravel had some ore jennies that had heralds from the Duluth Mesabi and Northern. Northwestern Steel and Wire in Sterling IL would take tank cars and cut the top off for use as inplant gons and they also had some former Burlington 50 ft box cars with the roof removed for the same Duty. Here in Milwaukee there was a Pierre Marquette gondola that lasted into the 1990s at harnischfeger Cranes. A firm that made bottling machinery in Cudahy WI would assemble them on Old flat cars and move them through the plant not certain where they all came from but they were like 35 ft long heavy on the wood and some still had Fox and archbar trucks when they closed they all got scrapped on site and I never taken a photo of them. So sad and stupid
I actually really like that the Canadian Government was supplying grain hoppers, that's Government action at work and we need more of it, like I think the Rails should all be owned by the Government, just like our roads and just like how every European country operates
2:52 I find that part very funny!
CN also sent their grain to Portland Maine in the winter when their ports were frozen.
Under the Crows Nest Agreement, the Canadian government loaned CP the money to complete the rails to the west coast, along with repaying the loan, CP agreed to low rates for some bulk commodities. The 1890s rates were never increased, and the government arbitrarily later forced CN (and it's forbearers) to take the same rate. 70 years on and the railroads were losing huge money moving grain and there was no way they were going to spend the capital needed to buy new equipment that would never return the investment, hence the government paid for the new hoppers. In the 80s through to 1992 the rates were finally improved and the railroads became responsible for purchasing any new equipment.
Sadly, the Government of Canada hoppers, along with those in about a dozen other colourful paint schemes are coming to the end of the service life and are being replaced by boring battleship gray hoppers with just the railroads names on the side.
Your screen grabs of covered hopper loading were from BN promo film, Portrait of a Railroad, and were taken in Colfax, WA in the Palouse region of southeast Washington. Boxcars were incompatible with unit grain train rates, which were first published by BN in 1982, which stipulated a set number of hours to load and discharge a train.
A part of our heritage.
I think boxcars were the first freight railcars & were the only freight railcars around from the 1800s through the early 1900s including cattle cars which were also boxcars used for carrying livestock.
Nice Video
Brazil used some boxcars as grain cars too
But we put hoppers under the boxcar
Nice!
Love those green Hudson Bay trains
This reminds me of boxcar barns.
I never knew those type of boxcars existed
I wonder if they’re the inspiration for the grain cars for the original Thomas Wooden Railway range?
Nice and interesting video. Greetings from Berlin/ Germany. Sven
nice video
Wow
I surprised they lasted so long. Nowadays I get the feeling with how ruthless the mega corp train lines are they would immediately scrap something so inefficient and outdated.
Thanks for sharing this history, what terminal is that at 3:14? Never seen one painted in anything other than monolith-grey.
That’s a Richardson Pioneer terminal.
The grain hopper is my favorite freight car
There neat cars for sure but my favorite is the boxcar
You forgot to add Burlington Northern’s “Portrait of a Railroad” as a source of footage.
Great video, Also can we get more trainz theory
I know we did that in the US too
Pretty cool 😎 👌
2:52 KASUMI NAKASU LMAO
Is that Mario music and Kirby music in the background? I was having strange flashes of nostalgia through the video.
1:40
1:52
HELLO FROM THUNDER BAY 🙋🏻🙋🏻
Where is the footage from 3:56 from? I’d love to see it
1st like & comment:
Just wanna say I can already tell it’s good!
AmtrakGuy365 Thank you for telling a history of my country. I have actually never seen the Manitoba Buffalo logo anywhere, although I've seen plenty of those Saskatchewan grain logos. Do you know of any other provincial logos like the grain logo or the buffalo logo that are stenciled onto the cars?
The province of Alberta has a hopper car fleet painted blue with yellow lettering
What was the location shown at 1:18, if you would know?
THUNDER BAY WOOOOOOO YEEEEAAAAAHHHHH I LOVE MY CITY!!!
The unloading process makes sense, but how exactly would you go about loading grain into a boxcar?
The spout is fastened to the top board on the grain door and pointed to the back (end) of the boxcar. It is a jointed spout and flexible. The grain falls down the tube so fast that it shoots almost all the way to the end. When one end is full, the chute is redirected to the other end. I used to get up in the boxcar with my dad to help shovel the resulting mounds into a more level load. The center of the car only got what slid down the mound and what was shoveled from them. Don't know that this would have worked on 50' cars and is probably why you never hear of a 50' grain boxcar.
@@ronatwell5379 to the best of my knowledge only the SOO Line and CB&Q had newer Steel 50 ft box cars that were okay for grain loading built in the early 1960s. The only way to tell was on the door the top part folded back for green inspection and on the inside wall you would see a striped marking to show the height which were marked for corn wheat and barley. I'd guess they were all gone by the mid-1990s
Nice SMB theme
wow
Any grain boxcars get preserved?
Idk if I or anyone else has mentioned this but you should do a video of the trains from the grand theft auto series
london ontario Cn rail owns one has all the same paint is on active tracks :)
"How interesting! Just look at that!"
Q: Japanese TrainZ?
how did they get the grain inside? was there a hole in the roof?
If you look at the thumbnail pic, the loading spout from the elevator was inserted into that open spot over that brown inner door (called a grain door). It was loaded as high as the grain door and then the main door was sealed. When they got to the unloading port, the boxcar was out on a rocker to move it from side to side and the grain doors were cut open to allow the grain to spill out. Anything left behind was shovelled out.