Hol,
If FW&D only had two troop kitchen cars converted to baggage express service and these two were later converted to way cars in 1968, it appears to me that they became nos. 73 and 102. Photos of the two cars after conversion to way cars seem to show them to be almost identical and both exhibit the blanked off side door and triple windows. That is clearly evident in the photos shown in the new way car book on pages 589 and 600. No. 82, on the other hand, was certainly a custom built car, but it doesn't exhibit any evidence of being converted from one of the troop kitchen cars as the other cars do.
I don't know what the authors' source was, but they indicate that no. 82 was built from parts of the wood way car that it replaced which had been badly damaged in a fire.
Bill Barber Gravois Mills, MO Mon Aug 20, 2012 6:24 am (PDT) . Posted by:
Steve Goen is quite close to the truth of the matter, at least as it was told to me by FW&D mechanical department personnel involved at the time. The two were indeed converted at the Childress shops during 1968 from box express cars 109-110. They were built to fill a desperate need for cabooses for local service, as the FW&D's fleet of aging wooden cars was in poor shape, and while the company had been allowed (by the Q) to purchase a dozen modern extended vision cupola cars (at the same time the C&S got an identical batch), these cars were strictly for mainline service, and the cars released by their arrival were in as poor condition as those already in local freight service. So the mechanical people took matters into their own hands, and without approval or authority, converted the two former troop kitchen cars, one -- the 102 -- a copy of the new extended vision cars (though without the wide cupola) and the other -- the 82 -- a bay window design concocted by several Childress shop personnel. This latter car, with its Jeep Wagoneer doors incorporated into the bay window to provide an opening window, porthole windows in each end, and old Andrews trucks from the car it replaced, is a real "classic." Both of the existing cabooses carrying the numbers 82 and 102 -- the latter a former Q car -- were quietly scrapped and no record made of their scrapping. A thorough search of company records would seem to indicate that the two old wooden cars were still in service -- I know, because I made that search when working on the roster for "The Colorado Road," and before I was aware of the existence of these two oddball home-built cars. Thus they did not appear in my FW&D caboose roster when "The Colorado Road" was published in 1970.
That the new 102 was painted aluminum like the extended vision cars it copied, while the truly odd second 82 was painted Chinese red is unexplained. I would love to see a photo of it coupled to one-of-a-kind Chinese red NW2 605!
We have the FW&D AFE files at the Colorado Railroad Museum (along with those of the C&S and CB&Q), and there is absolutely no record there of the existence of either of these cars.
In a somewhat less blatant example of taking matters into your own hands to get what was needed, the "Denver" removed the cupola from caboose 63 in 1976 or '77 to create a yard service/transfer caboose for Fort Worth. This, too, was done without formal authorization. The farther from the general offices you were, the easier it was to get away with such things! Maybe that's the real reason BN moved its headquarters to Fort Worth! (JOKE! Please don't take that comment seriously!)
Hol
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