Cross tie
Cross bearer
Bolster
COURTESY OF BOB’S PHOTO: SAN DIEGO, CA; DEC. 18, 1954
A weathered GN 44998 was equipped with a composite Superior side door (above). The lower door track on cars equipped with Superior doors was mounted a few inches higher up than on cars with Youngstown doors. Note that the end ladder reached to the bottom of car’s end. GN 44047 (below) has a January 1945 built date. It received all steel Youngstown doors. The end ladders on this car did not reach all the way to the bottom of the end. The car was repainted mineral red in August, 1953, with white lettering and a white and black herald. GN 44272 (bottom) was repainted with a billboard size Empire Builder type road name. This scheme was used on mineral red cars starting in 1956 and later on vermilion red cars. The vermilion red cars had mineral red underbodies and trucks.
End view 10′-0″
GN 44400-44749 series boxcar Drawn by James Kinkaid Full size for HO scale: 3.5mm=1′-0″; 1:87.1
program” according to a letter from Mr. C. O. Jenks in AFE (Authorization for Expenditure) file No. 70033. The rea- soning was that boxcar ownership had gone down from 46,938 in 1934 to 42,087 in 1944 despite the 8,000 “pur- chase” cars and the 1,000 1944-vintage plywood-side cars added after 1938. In addition, according to company docu- ments 9,444 of those cars were “less than 2,900 cubic capacity, making them unsuitable for general loading.” When the GN made known they planned to build these cars in the fourth quarter of 1945 the War Produc- tion Board and the Office of Defense Transportation inquired whether they might build the cars earlier in time for the wheat harvest “since the wheat loading in the northwest was the most urgent requirement for boxcars.” As it turned out, a strike of lumber industry employees delayed the delivery of ply- wood, and the cars were not completed until February of 1946.
During planning for these cars there
was a suggestion to use Cor-Ten steel in the underframe and in the running board. The GN felt that the extra 138 dollars per car for the underframe was not worth it, but they went for the ex-
RAILROAD MODEL CRAFTSMAN
W. C. WHITTAKER
NORMAN F. PRIEBE: HARLOWTON, MT; SEPT. 2, 1973
tra 20 dollars for the running board be- cause “we will save that in repair costs, which is quite an item as running boards are closely watched by the Fed- eral Inspectors and must be main- tained 100%.” Already by the time only 72 cars had been built cracks were de-
tected in three of the underframes. The cars had to be called back to have the frames reinforced.
Among the papers with the AFE on this series is a February 8, 1945, letter from Mr. C. O. Jenks to Mr. I. G. Pool: “The Carnegie-Illinois Steel Corporation
65
14′-7¹⁄₂″
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