National trailers

[sirenwerks]

Interesting pic from 1964 in Commerce Cali on the Santa Fe.  Can anyone speak about the National low rider trailers on the first car?  I am curious when these trailers might have disappeared from the rails and whether they ran regionally or nationally.

[jagged ben]

Nice photo. 

The only confirmed sighting of those in my collection of tagged photos is from 1960 at Caliente on Tehachapi.  Same decade same region.  I was actually surprised I got a hit.

In general, drop frame trailers of that style seem to have been built in the 60s or earlier, although a few were still riding trains into the early 80s.  Many independent shippers seen on the rails have come and gone pretty quickly throughout the intermodal era.

[James Costello]

Drop frame trailers are also pretty poorly documented amongst the intermodal fleets - here's the last time we spoke about their usages and era:
https://www.therailwire.net/forum/index.php?topic=41155.msg512453#msg512453

Appliances? Furniture? Carpet? Moving business? Autoparts?

Interesting that both trailers are different.

[sirenwerks]

Nice photo. 

Thanks, not mine admittedly.  I have come to find Facebook railfan and rail historical pages are ripe with hereto unpublished material, especially a lot of 60s-70s photos.  Great reference shots like this one and the occasional  poor quality Instamatic photo from someone's childhood that still manages to offer so much information.   Of course, there's a lot of mean spirited behavior and bad modeling that goes with those good pics and a huge amount of cross posting to weed through...

[Ed Kapuscinski]

Thanks, not mine admittedly.  I have come to find Facebook railfan and rail historical pages are ripe with hereto unpublished material, especially a lot of 60s-70s photos.  Great reference shots like this one and the occasional  poor quality Instamatic photo from someone's childhood that still manages to offer so much information.   Of course, there's a lot of mean spirited behavior and bad modeling that goes with those good pics and a huge amount of cross posting to weed through...

This is so true! I have a quiet program of watching the various Conrail groups to add stuff to the CRHS Photo Archive.
These were all picked up off of Facebook (with permission, of course), for example.
https://conrailphotos.thecrhs.org/photographers/guy-span

[Albert in N]

   The first picture of two trailers on a relatively short flat car remind me of this early N scale Atlas car.  The 24 foot trailers are not low boys but look too short for the model flat car.  Did UP or any other railroad actually have these??

[jagged ben]

In the 1950s you did see 22ft trailers on a single 50ft flat car.  However that paint scheme for the trailers resembles UPs 1970s schemes, and almost certainly was never applied to a trailer that size, since by that time you don't really see trailers smaller than 40ft in TOFC.  UP trailers in that era apparently would have been yellow red and silver with the 'Rail Truck Service' logo.  I see a lot more pics of models than prototypes online.   

I think Atlas got a lot of mileage out of that old tooling doing inaccurate stuff.

[nkalanaga]

The Atlas car, and trailers, seem to be a copy of the Athearn car of the same era, and apparently is at least close to a CNW car.  There is an article here, although the author put in a lot of extra work:

https://cnwhs.org/wp1/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/CNWHS_Modeler_Vol_12-3.pdf

Just my opinion, but if one has these cars, and models the 1950s, they would probably fit in, without shortening the trailers.  Remove the front axle, and they look better.  Of course, if you want to match a particular prototype, go for it!

[learmoia]

The Atlas car, and trailers, seem to be a copy of the Athearn car of the same era, and apparently is at least close to a CNW car.  There is an article here, although the author put in a lot of extra work:

https://cnwhs.org/wp1/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/CNWHS_Modeler_Vol_12-3.pdf

Just my opinion, but if one has these cars, and models the 1950s, they would probably fit in, without shortening the trailers.  Remove the front axle, and they look better.  Of course, if you want to match a particular prototype, go for it!

Fun fact... The 20' Trailers that he repainted into CNW, were Red 'National' Trailers 

[nkalanaga]

~Ian:  I hadn't looked that deeply into the article, but you're right, they were!  An interesting way to tie both of the topics here together.