Canadian wheat herald

[nkalanaga]

Question:  When did the Canadian railroads start using this wheat herald?


Thank you.

[central.vermont]

Roughly 1972 according to this on the Trains blog.

http://cs.trains.com/trn/b/observation-tower/archive/2017/07/26/farewell-to-the-great-canadian-hopper-fleet.aspx

Jon

[nkalanaga]

That early?  Thank you!

All of the boxcars I've been able to find with the wheat herald were from the very late 70s or 80s, too late for my 1974 railroad.  Guess I'll have to find a covered hopper.  I model Montana, but Canadian cars weren't uncommon in the Northwest, and I do have a feed mill.

I have four boxcars in storage, as they're too new...

[cv_acr]

Roughly 1972 according to this on the Trains blog.

Not quite....

That's talking about the signature covered hoppers owned by the Canadian Wheat Board, which started arriving in the 1970s.

CN and CP also started reconditioning older 40' boxcars and assigning them to grain service in the 1970s for use on un-upgraded light prairie branchlines that couldn't handle the weight of the new larger hoppers. Some of these were also reconditioned with government funds and specially marked so they didn't get used for any service but grain.

I haven't seen the wheat symbol used on boxcars before at least 1980.

That Trains article also fails in that it only mentions the CWB painting the cars in the later bright red "Canada" scheme which was not the original scheme used on cars built in the 1970s. The red scheme was introduced in the early 1980s. The 1970s built cars were brown:


http://canadianfreightcargallery.ca/cgi-bin/image.pl?i=cp600058&o=cprail

[nkalanaga]

I remember seeing the brown scheme occasionally in Pasco.

But, as I feared, the boxcars are too new for my era.  Oh well, into storage they go.

As for "un-upgraded light prairie branchlines", the last large group of 40 ft boxcars I saw were in 1983, in Wenatchee, WA.  The BN kept them for hauling wheat from the ex-GN Mansfield Branch, where some of the rail dated to the 1890s, having come off the original GN mainline.  When it was abandoned, and the grain shifted to trucks, the cars were scrapped.  No BN cars in the string stored east of Appleyard, just GN, NP, and CB&Q.  It looked like the 1960s.

[cv_acr]

As for "un-upgraded light prairie branchlines", the last large group of 40 ft boxcars I saw were in 1983, in Wenatchee, WA.

Canadian 40'ers lasted about a decade longer than in the US.

I went through my 1986 ORER totalling up 40' boxcars of various descriptions and I stopped counting when I exceeded 10,000 on Canadian National - and precisely zero on several of the US Class Is I checked.

[nkalanaga]

I think the actual last use of "plain" 40 ft boxcars by the BN was in Texas, for hauling baled cotton.  The industry was set up to ship, and bill, by the carload, that being a set number of bales.  50 ft cars wouldn't work, as they threw the billing off, so the BN ran 40 footers until the industry caught up.  That was sometime in the 80s, but just when I have no idea, it could well have been before 1986.

In the US, grain had largely switched to trucks, and many of the local elevators closed, by the early 80s.  The remaining elevators could handle larger blocks of cars, and trucking wheat to a central point was cheaper than switching the small elevators.  Apparently, in Canada, either the economics or the regulations favored the local elevators.

And, from what I've read, many of the Canadian branchlines were like the Mansfield Branch - they couldn't handle 100 ton cars due to light rail.