Location of brake gear on rebuilds

[princessclyne69]

I’m building four 120000 series “steel underframe” (double sheathed wood body) boxcars for my late-fifties layout, from Sunshine kits. Yes, I know it may be stretching things a bit because these cars were rapidly disappearing from revenue rosters by that time. These would have been the cars that did not get rebuilt to “all-steel”, new steel sides and new roof with old underframe and ends. It seems that a lot of these survivors hung around, probably on branch lines, or stored and pulled into service during the grain rush every year.

Sunshine includes a model photo showing how the conversion to AB brakes looked, with the triple valve and the reservoir on opposite sides and both closer to the center, between the two big pairs of transverse crossbearers. A couple of the photos I have show both the triple valve and the reservoir outboard of the crossbearer nearest the A end, between the crossmember and the truck. Of course, no photos show both sides of the same car.

When I looked under the two steel rebuild cars that still exist in western Kansas, one of them also shows the triple valve and the reservoir as far toward the A end as possible (It’s a straight underframe 40′ car, originally 42177) so that reinforces the idea that this could have been done occasionally. I built two of these cars previously, several years apart, but the models are in Wichita and I’m not, so I can’t compare.

So one question is, would it be reasonable to assume that some or many cars could have had this kind of variation in rebuilding? I’m quite aware that consistency wasn’t always practiced in this sort of work, to put it politely. Second, anybody have photos that might actually show this? Older photos of the 120000s aren’t much help, because they probably almost all had K brakes for most of their lives. I’m also assuming that almost all cars that did not get rebuilt to steel sides still were upgraded to AB brakes, based on the 1953 deadline for conversion to make them legal for interchange. In the context of mid-century Kansas railroading, to get cars from a branch elevator to a terminal grain elevator usually meant interchanging off the MP. But that assumption could be wrong.

Comments welcome.

RG7

[peggyrothschild]

Ron
I agree that the steel rebuilds would have received AB brakes so they could be interchanged during their shoppings. I scanned the 1958 MP freight car assignments and 15 of the 120000 wood boxcars were in service to/from Mexico hauling an ore. Here’s the url to the document. http://mopac.org/archives/freight-operations/29-mopac-july-1-1958-freight-car-roster-and-assignments
The MP certainly got a lot of use out of the 120000 series cars, LCL cabooses, caboose underframes, MoW tool cars and the Eagle Merchandise cars. Would make for an interesting article for the Eagle.

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