Subject:
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Re: Relative height of cars and cabooses
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.trains
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Date:
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Wed, 23 Aug 2000 08:20:25 GMT
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Viewed:
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663 times
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In lugnet.trains, Christopher Masi writes:
> I have noticed that box cars and hoppers (not all but a lot of them) are
> the same height as engines, flat beds with truck trailers are a bit
> higher, double stacks are a bit higher, autoracks are a bit higher, and
> tanks are a bit lower. So where do cabooses fit in? I would guess that a
> caboose without a cupola would be the same height as an engine too, but
> what about a caboose with a cupola? I would guess that the main roof
> line is level with the box cars and engines and the cupola sticks up a
> bit. Is that right or should the main roof line of the caboose be a bit
> shorter?
This answer is for american practice, rather than european (where cabooses per
se were not at all common, although brakevans *were* used)... note that early
canadian writings may refer to a caboose as a brakevan.
The answer is, of course: "it depends", as it always does when speaking of
american practice.
100 years ago, the most common car (by far) was the box car. At that time the
common size for a box car was 35 feet long and about 9 or so high, I believe.
So caboose main roofs were set to be about the same height. And the cupola
windows then had a good view over the rooftops with enough of an angle that
the rear brakeman or conductor (whoever had cupola duty) had a good view of he
train and could spot trouble such as incipient hot boxes or dragging equipment
whenever the train went round a curve.
As time went by, the standard boxcar size changed to 40 feet and 10'8" high, I
believe. Cabooses didn't really keep up. While newer ones may have had
slightly higher cupolas the main roof wasn't always raised. For this reason
other innovations such as the extended vision cupola (hanging out over the
edges a bit, like my model does) and the bay window caboose were introduced.
These helped, although I suspect the bay window wasn't as popular as it
required the duty guy to move from side to side every time a curve in the
other direction came up.
The only saving grace was that boxcars as a proportion of the mix were getting
less. (I'm not sure what the most common car is these days, but it's almost
certainly either the unit train hopper or the articulated doublestack unit if
you are allowed to count one unit as one car, although we've heard here about
how NS does it) This meant that it was a bit easier to see.
Cabooses are now pretty much obsolete, having been replaced with FRED, and
things like trackside dragging equipment detectors and hotbox detectors
(which, once they spot something, broadcast a repeating message of the
form "drag detected at axle 384 of train 186" over and over on the train's
operating frequency).
++Lar
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Message has 1 Reply:
 | | Re: Relative height of cars and cabooses
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| (...) Another one of the reasons for the uniform height of most cars was so you could switch cars with people on top of them, controlling the moves via relayed hand signals. Handbrakes also used to be located on top of the cars, and later, on the (...) (24 years ago, 23-Aug-00, to lugnet.trains)
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Message is in Reply To:
| | Relative height of cars and cabooses
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| I have noticed that box cars and hoppers (not all but a lot of them) are the same height as engines, flat beds with truck trailers are a bit higher, double stacks are a bit higher, autoracks are a bit higher, and tanks are a bit lower. So where do (...) (24 years ago, 22-Aug-00, to lugnet.trains)
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