Re: [CBQ] Auto Racks

["Fred Crissey" <fhc925@frontier.com>]

RE Auto racks:

For several years (early 1960's) Whitehead and Kales had a virtual monopoly on the auto rack business and they had a quite a backlog of orders.  W&K were also building box cars for the US government for use in Vietnam.  The railroads and the auto companies were not happy with this situation so Paragon entered the business.  Their plant was in Novi, MI on the C&O.  The Q was evidently satisfied with their work and they got most of, if not all, of the business until the BN took place.  After the merger this relationship continued.

There were other users of rack cars besides Ford, GM and Chrysler.  The FW&D handled business for AMC (Nash) out of Kenosha on the CNW.  The Q did not handle any of this traffic but FW&D did on a move via CNW-StLouis-SLSF-Irving-FW&D to Houston.  This was on trilevel cars.

The Q did handle a lot of traffic going to the PNW from Jeep (or Kaiser-Jeep) at Toledo switched by the Ann Arbor.  Most of this traffic move via AA-Milan-WAB-Chgo-CBQ-StPaul-GN/NP.  After the N&W merger some of this traffic moved "cross-lake" via AA-GBW-EWinona-CBQ-etc. as the AA was sold to the DT&I.  IIRC these were on bi-levels.

The last pool was about four to ten CBQ bilevels assigned to Massey-Ferguson at Detroit on the C&O.  I do not remember the actual number of cars.  These were very unique cars.  They were "self-unloaders".  Massey shipped tractors from their Detroit plant to Midwest destinations.  One section of the "B" (upper) deck could move down to the main deck using a system of winches and cables that could be moved by one person.  No auto ramp required.   They were built with the idea that some of their dealers could take a large number of tractors at a time.  But this did not work out so Massey would ship to two or three dealers using one car making "stopoffs".  This caused all kinds problems and it seemed they spent more time on the C&O's rip track than in service.  I'm pretty sure these were W&K cars.  

Finally let's talk about "tie-downs".  The Big Three each had separate designs to tie down their vehicles to the railcars.  I think this was on purpose so that you couldn't move a Ford car to GM or whatever so they could keep their shipping capacity.  And the tie-downs were not cheap plus finding someone to do the work.  Finally some common sense occurred between the carriers and auto firms in the late 1970s and now there is one pool for rack cars all with the same tiedowns in North America administered by the AAR and this includes the import autos.

Fred Crissey

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