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Well, Leo's got an "accidental scrapping story".....not to be outdone I've got one also.
This was told to me when I was a young Trainmaster at El Reno, OK by the Late "Goldie" Hensen, car foreman for many years at the El Reno terminal.
"Chicago" put out an order to scrap a certain car..or maybe it was just one of a series of cars to be scrapped...Well someplace during the process someone discovered that a car similar to the one to be destroyed, but not the right one, had been destroyed...
Well, being ever resourceful, and not entirely above a bit of "skulduggery" where someone's job might be in danger as railroad men tend to be a solution was found to the problem.
The rip track formeman was advised to keep on the lookout for a "foreign" car exactly like the one accidentally destroyed..I don't know know how long it took, but one day the "right" foreign empty with the same AAR clasification and specification came across the Rip Track.
Said foreign car was taken to the paint shop, sandblasted down and repainted in the proper Rock Island colors and numbering to match the ill fated "accident car"...This "ghost" car was then released from the rip track as a normal mty and put back into service and "voila" the job was done and no one was the wiser. You say "How could this happen"?...Wouldn't someone go looking for the disappearing foreign car..Well, yes they probably did, but those of us familiar with railroad car record keeping in the "dear dead days...the days beyond recall" prior to computer tracking several clerks probably spent a considerable number of hours "tracing " each other over the course of some years and the file probably "died" on some clerk's desk several years later....Anyhow...as Goldie related the tale, which I have little doubt that it was true...they never heard anything about it from "headquarters"
In another instance which came to mind as I was writing this some of you may recall that during the years of the Penn-Central debacle that the LaSalle and Bureau County railroad, which was a switching line operating around the industrial areas near La Salle-Peru Illinois under the management of mobster "Joe Bananas" just appropriated several Penn Central boxcars and without even repainting the cars and perhaps without even re numbering them just re lettered the cars and sent them out as LS&BC cars and collected perdiem on them as well as the use of the cars for local industries.
Well, that little caper resulted in some folks doing a little "hard time" IIRC when somehow, unbelievable as it might seem someone on the PC figured out what had happened.
Pete
-----Original Message----- From: qutlx1 <qutlx1@aol.com> To: cbq <cbq@yahoogroups.com> Sent: Fri, Nov 25, 2011 7:37 am Subject: [CBQ] Olympus Scrapped Dave asked.........."Unbelievable!! How in the world can you “accidentally” scrap a stainless
steel baggage car?!?" Unfortunately scrapping a good car happens more often than one would think. Generally its a breakdown in communication to the guys actually working the job,lack of a double check procedure(the old measure twice,saw once) or failure to follow the double check procedure. I know one dismantler who will not start work until the foreman has stencilled each car that is to be scrapped. No special stencil you dont touch the car. On active cars "cut": in error the car owner simply presents the dismantling contractor the AAR depreciated value of the car.When the scrapper realizes he has to pay $30-$80,000 for $12-15,000 worth of scrap the above procedures get put in place real fast.
Leo Phillipp
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