[princessclyne69]

I know of two places where this is easily found. One is an Eagle article on heavyweight coaches, researched and written by Ed Hawkins. The issue includes a spreadsheet on every steel coach owned by MP Lines. The issue is Spring/Summer 2004.

Car 6328 was rebuilt in the early 40s from coach 8173, built 2/1915. Most of the cars rebuilt at that time got larger men’s and women’s lounges, one at each end of the car, so the seating capacity was reduced. The spreadsheet does not include the seating capacity, since this is an all-time roster and so many cars were rebuilt. The most likely number is in the range of 50-ish or a few more seats. Sometimes you can count the seat pairs based on the windows, but this is not foolproof.

The other source — Some of the sets of passenger car diagrams are available from the Society, but I can’t lay my hands on mine right now. I know we published a CD of cars surviving after 1963, and a CD of passenger car diagrams beginning with the 1880s. After my move I’ve only just today uncovered some of these CDs, but the passenger car one is not there.

This CD is currently available from the Company Store.

RG7

[princessclyne69]

Jim:

This sounds about right. I suspect not too many gons from this series got repainted, since they built the 50′ ones, but there might have been some.

On a related note, in about 1970 I built one of those 19000-series 50′ gons (actually 52’6″), built over a span from 51 to 58 according to the SoE, by modifying the shape of the fishbelly of an Athearn gon. One of the few cars I built from that era that I still have in service.

RG7

[princessclyne69]

I may paint one black and dirty, and the other red and fairly clean. I’ll know more next week.

RG7

[princessclyne69]

A bit more detail….

Watch eBay for photos. I haven’t been following the Alcos, because my interest is primarily engines before the renumbering. If you go in once a week, that’s probably good enough since most of the photos are on a 7-day bid cycle.

Many years ago I bought some photos from Ralph Carlson. There may be a couple of shots in there of Alcos in blue. I moved my non-digitized photo collection to Wichita in the last trip, but I’ll be up there after Thursday so I’ll look.

I’ve half-heartedly tried to maintain a database of some engines from that period with their features, but I don’t have anything on these. F units and Geeps, I can tell you something about.

RG7

[princessclyne69]

I’ve been seeing them occasionally on eBay. I haven’t tried to track how many of them actually got repainted, but since there are also a number of photos of them un-repainted but with the new numbers, that suggests that not all of them were.

Pure speculation on my part, but I suspect that, in the first couple of years after 1961 when the repaint program started, the passenger locomotive and car repainting may have moved fairly quickly, more so than that of repainting freight locomotives. Of course, at the same time, John German was trying to get rid of the non-EMD power so it’s hard to tell at this stage which program was moving faster. The fact that MP actually bought an E-8 along with the B&M lightweight passenger cars probably says something about this.

RG7

[princessclyne69]

The deed is done.

I spent the last couple of weeks in Houston removing loose stuff from the railroad and turning modules on their sides to remove the legs. Rail joiners, jumpers, turnout points, trees, everything that could fall off went into ziploc bags. I built two racks to hold the full-size modules (everything about five feet and up), and in a burst of over-engineering, I taped a piece of 1/4″ neoprene over each track end on the modules, except for a couple that had elevated scenery on the end. The long runs of straight track in the corridor were cut in half, and I extracted the four-foot segment of track that ran through the wall. I bet that hole will spark some curiosity in potential future owners.

After a few days delay due to the freeze, I picked up a 20′ U-Haul on Monday morning the 22nd. Loading crew showed up and stuffed the truck full from front to back, although only about four feet deep. We set off Tuesday at 6 am and arrived without incident in Wichita at 4:30. Then a lot of complicated stuff happened, due to car rental problems, failure of the gate operator, and a couple of other things, but the truck was safely inside. Wednesday the 24th, the other moving crew arrived and unloaded it all into the building. Now the fun begins.

I am incredibly grateful that despite a low temp of -11 F in Wichita, nothing froze in either the building or the house. Houston wasn’t so fortunate, as you’ve probably heard, and we were without power in Houston for almost a day. I had some old L-girders and things that went into the fireplace, but that saved me the trouble of disposing of them later.

Pictures later.

RG7

[princessclyne69]

As far as we can tell from where the photos were taken, by 1950 these units had been moved around to various divisions. By that time at least some diesel service facilities existed at just about all the major terminals. It’s hard to say exactly when ‘locomotive sets’ started to be broken up, but it didn’t take long. By the mid-fifties it was beginning to be common to see any units that could be MUed together, in freight service or in passenger service, to be mixed and matched. That left the few Baldwin road units out in the cold.

I believe the very first dieselization, with the FTs during the war, would have been somewhat limited in where they were operated due to the requirements for both diesel fueling and service facilities plus crew training, as well as to ‘keep an eye on them’ to see that they were behaving right and to see that they got as much utilization as possible. The Dupo – Little Rock – Texarkana run was the heaviest traffic on the railroad, so a natural for this. Once more divisions acquired the service facilities, it seems have become open season fairly quickly.

By 1950 the biggest steam engines were being pushed out to divisions where they had been rare before, such as Wichita Division, primarily because of dieselization of the more major main lines. Stagner’s ‘Missouri Pacific Steam Finale in Kansas’ has a discussion on this.

RG7

[princessclyne69]

Follow-up: I checked Google Maps and the information shown on the Condensed Profile seems to be borne out. Note that I made one typo, in that bridge 3459 is “about one-half mile” west of bridge 3453, not 1.2 as I tried to say.

RG7

[princessclyne69]

First I checked the Official Guide (I have a copy from 1966), which shows in the Index of Stations that Rantoul is served by the MP and no other railroad. Rantoul is just west of Osowatomie, which would be the Pueblo main line (now abandoned). I don’t know anything about trails.

But in the Condensed Profile charts, Rantoul shows between milepost 343 and 344. There are two bridges shown between milepost 345 and 346, one is called bridge 24, a 150′ through truss bridge over Middle Creek flowing into the Marais des Cygnes River, the next is bridge 3459 about 1.2 mile to the west, shown as a 3 panel reinforced concrete trestle.

Some explanation on bridge numbers is in order. It appears that at one time, late 19th – early 20th century, significant bridges on MP lines were numbered in order from east to west, in the direction of increasing mileposts. At some point this was changed to include every bridge, and to number the bridges in miles and tenths of miles from St. Louis, to match the mileposts. So the bridge shown as bridge 24 was probably later identified as bridge 3453 because it was around milepost 345.3. That is probably what’s painted on the bridge.

On the Condensed Profile, the only information on the bridge is that it has a clearance of 22′-0″ above the rail. The other piece of information shown on it is that the rail at that location was laid (replacement of earlier rail) in 1938. The elevation above sea level at that point is 838′, with a rise of about 1 foot from the track elevation on either side of the bridge. The track at that point is tangent (straight), with a curve to the right (north) beginning about a half-mile to the west, and a slightly sharper curve to the right, as viewed from the bridge (south) beginning about a half-mile to the east.

Hope this helps.

RG7

[princessclyne69]

I’m re-posting these files in a more manageable size.

RG7

[attachment=1:1kosjtc7]Container chassis p. 1 reduced.pdf[/attachment:1kosjtc7]

[attachment=0:1kosjtc7]Container chassis p. 2 reduced.pdf[/attachment:1kosjtc7]

[princessclyne69]

Here is the two-page article from the Missouri Pacific magazine, December 1956. Quite a few details about the container roster, besides the chassis.

RG7

[princessclyne69]

The building is complete. We’re spending the weekend moving supplies and equipment. No modules yet, and no track, so no rolling stock is moving in yet.

RG7

[princessclyne69]

If you’re good with scissors, you could probably convert the P into an I.

Most of the M-I cars built new after 1945 had a very plain I, but there was one shop (apparently) that had an I stencil with small serifs at top and bottom, which seemed to do restenciling work on cars that needed repainting or perhaps minor repairs. Photo evidence of this stenciling style is rare, but it does exist.

And of course, no Eagles stencil on any M-I car.

RG7

[princessclyne69]

Those shots are taken from the I-135 (Canal Route) overpass, looking toward downtown. I could have been in the yard that day, on my daily drive into the engine facility parking lot, beyond that two-track car repair shop on the left.

RG7

[princessclyne69]

So while we’re at it, how about this one?

[attachment=0:3gs1krna]89-32 Jul 71.jpg[/attachment:3gs1krna]

Looking at this car now, my best guess is that it was converted from a GS gon. Evidently it has had some additional underframe reinforcement.

In the 1968 SoE, there are a few surviving GS gons with 12 drop doors, in the series 90000-91946, reportedly built 1913. Could this car have come from that series?

RG7

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