As I travel and see trains, I am always interested in know more about the trains themselves. Many times, in seeing the train, we seem to skip over the most important part of the train, and that is the cars. The locomotive is a favorite piece of the train—it gets most of the glory, but without the cars the locomotive would be useless.
When you see the cars that the locomotive is pulling doing you ever ask yourself, “what types of cars am I seeing?” The three most frequent cars that I see are the box car, the tank cars, and the Open-top Hopper.
The Box Car is probably the most familiar car to everyone, since it is so versatile and can be used to haul many different types of material. They come in different lengths and heights. These cars can haul many different products from raw material to finished products.
The Tank Car is basically what the name suggests, it is a tank on wheels. They carry many different types of liquid from one place to another to supply the users on the other end the liquid products like oil, corn syrup, and chemicals.
The Open-top Hopper is an open carrier. These carry materials like coal, gravel, and sand among other commodities that are not affected by weather conditions.
These are the types that I mostly see, but the types of cars are different for different parts of the country and even different destinations on the same track. There are three great resources that you can use as a field guide to identifying train cars available on various railroad company websites:
The above drawings are taken from the CSX website. CSX provides a great drawing reference and description of the cars sizes and functions.
Union Pacific provides a photo display of the different types of cars on their line. These photos are available on UP.com.
BNSF provides a detailed outline of each of its types of railcars, with photos and specifications chart. These photos are available on BNSF.com.
So, the next time you see a train pull out one of these charts and discover what they are actually pulling.
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Train car drawings are taken from CSX.com