Railroad Loads

A very short intro.
I love loads. Gimme a load, any load.

An empty freight car isn’t generating income. Railroads want their cars to run fully loaded, but that isn’t always possible. Cars do run empty, whether it is an empty coal train going back to the mine or an empty boxcar returning to home rails, it’ll happen. Keeping cars filled on the homeward trek is something that doesn’t fall within the ambit of this discussion. Some day I may write some notes about Operations, then this whole full car/ empty car question will be discussed in more detail.

Railroad cars can be divided into two basic groups: open and closed types.

Open Cars
These types of cars are divided into two basic types: flatcars (with lowered floors as in the case of container cars, flat- for trailers, or with racks and stakes, e.g. auto racks, center beam flats and pulpwood cars) and hoppers/gondolas, for anything that doesn’t need protection from the elements. While technically not a flat car, spine cars, used for trailers and containers, and log cars can trace their heritage back to the flat car. It was figured that there is plenty of wasted weight on a car of this type and they were “cookie cut” accordingly to their present shape of center spines with mini platforms for the loads.

Closed Cars
Cars of this type include covered hoppers, boxcars, enclosed auto racks and tank cars.  The commodity carried by these cars demand that they be protected from the elements (cement from the rain) or humans (isn’t it great to throw rocks at a trainload of new cars?). You get the idea.
 As modelers, we are fortunate that these cars can be either loaded or empty, depending on our whim.  The inside of the car is hidden from the viewer and he can make either assumption.
Open cars are not so easy to explain away.

A flatcar and a hopper are like a stage just waiting for a story to be told on/in them. A load is a visually appealing item that can be as expensive or as cheap as you want to make it. It gives your car a purpose and by extension, your railroad too. Empty flat cars tend to get lost in the train; they’re almost like bare space. I often look at a freight train, focus on the boxcars and such and skim over the empty flat that crawls past my view. It may be a well built and prize winning model, but an empty flat car is, well, empty.

Loads and their fastenings is governed by the AAR OTLRM, the Association of American Railroads' Open Top Load Restraint Manual, to which I will refer extensively in my modelling efforts.

A quick visit to the local rail yard will reveal all kinds of cars loaded with all kinds of interesting loads. If you’re like me, you’ll tend to forego the trip to the local rail yard and instead focus your attention on the Internet so that you can download the photos you find for later reference. On the subject of photos; careful study will reveal the most common loading practices used by railroads in load transportation.

The most important items to look out for are cables/chains and wheel chocks. What isn’t always clear is the size of the materiel used to fasten the load. Loads are checked for compliance for high/wide compliance too. A load that doesn’t fit within the parameters of the loading gauge causes headaches for the railroad.

I cringe when I see a brilliant model railroad and there, in the middle of it, standing on a pedestal for all to see, is a flat car with a load that is as unrealistic as the railroad is realistic. Over the years I have identified various faults model loadmasters make when they load model flat cars.  These include:

1. Using glue/silly putty to fasten a load to the car.
2. Unrealistically shiny models
3. Over/under scale loads
4.  Incorrect fastenings of the loads (Ref 1 above)
5. Overloading- No cognizance of the weight of the load to the maximum axle load.

I've drawn up a wish list of articles I want to do on this subject. The how-to articles you’re going to find on this site were mostly made from bits and pieces I had lying about in my scrap box. As I complete them, I’ll add more articles. Keep an eye out for more articles. Oh, and by the way: make sure you know the load’s origin and destination, because invariably, somebody is going to ask you: “Where is that load going to?”