John,
Thanks for the clarification on the car house and the additional information on car movements. The car house in the photo is a small low building, probably not more than 6 or 8 feet high, with a roof slightly sloped to the rear.In fact, the whole building is slightly sloped away from the track. The typical wood rails leading from the building to the adjacent track are evident.
My main point in the post was that, based on the series of photos, the stock cars in question in Leo's post, were not in #5621's consist when it arrived at Shabbona, but were there when it left eastbound. It seems apparent to me that these particular stock cars came into Shabbona with a load of livestock on an earlier train and left empty, eastbound in #5621's consist on 10/16/1956 having been picked up by #5621's crew. It is certainly possible that east of Waterman. the stock cars could have been routed to some ot her location for another load. I did not intend to imply that it was certain that they would be returned home from Eola. That was just speculation on my part as I have no such knowledge of their disposition after Waterman. Thanks again for adding another potential possibility. Maybe there is another photo or two out there that could give us a more complete answer!
I do have one question. The lead stock car clearly has truss rods. Weren't truss rod equipped cars outlawed for interchange service at some point in time?
Bill Barber Gravois Mills, MO Sun Dec 22, 2013 10:27 am (PST) . Posted by:Another possibility, when we see freight cars moving in the "wrong" direction concerns a like known facet of railroading. The AAR had a freight car service bureau. The function of this agency was to supply cars where needed. If a railroad had more traffic, requiring a certain kind of car, than it had in it's supply, it would make a request to the bureau, which in turn would put out a request to member roads. Any road that had a surplus would send them to the requesting road. The supplying roads were happy to do this because it let them collect car per deim on otherwise idle cars. The best example of this was when eastern roads would send boxcars west to the granger roads during the grain rushes.
It didn't work very well with coal cars, because the eastern roads required a lot of cars at the same time mid-western roads did (winter). But stock cars were some times sent to other roads, this way.
Another example was the so called "heavy duty flat cars". Several eastern roads (PRR, NYC, NH, Erie, et.al.) rostered many of these cars, not only for their own traffic, but to rent to other roads. The AAR handled these requests as well.
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