Re: C&S caboose undercarriage yet again

Posted by Jim Courtney on
URL: http://c-sng-discussion-forum.254.s1.nabble.com/the-caboose-that-never-was-tp8369p10449.html

Great information, Ken,

Thanks for correcting my misconception. Last week I acquired a copy of the "C&S Passenger Equipment Folio 24". The way it is titled made me think that it was the 24th volume of Passenger Car folios. But your point is that it identifies a particular set of folio drawings, within all the Car Department drawings. The locomotive diagrams that are in the "Files" section are not numbered, but just dated to 1903.

Does anyone know the origin of the various folio drawings in folios 24 and 27? Were they done by the C&S at some point, all at once, or were they inherited with all the UP / DL&G records, then updated and revised?

Since the 1909-1910 SUF freight cars are included in Freight Equipment Folio 27, that would suggest that either the folios were compiled about 1910-1911, or alternatively, they were much older and that new sheets for newly acquired cars were drawn and added to the volume.

As to the caboose folio drawings, this still doesn't explain all the inconsistencies, the older car diagrams labeled with the new 1911 numbers, at a time that I would have thought most of the cabooses had been rebuilt. To me, that still suggests that older car diagrams were merely updated with dimension data, but not redrawn to show all the new changes of rebuilding.

A case in point is the folio drawing of caboose 304/1003. It has a diagram of a not yet rebuilt caboose, with short wheel base underframe. But the length is recorded as 14'-10". Derrell Poole has stated that in The Colorado & Southern Ry Freight Equipment roster, issued April 1, 1903, all the cabooses had short bodies (average inside length 12'5"), except caboose 303/1002 which was two feet longer (the car we suspect rode on a pair of freight car trucks).

So the dimensions of 304/1003 in the folio drawing must represent the rebuilding of the car to a long body, new car. Yet the underframe wheel base has not been redrawn/corrected to the modern 9' wheel base (as on 306/1005), nor has the image been corrected to show the end cupola, as in the drawing of 1007.

Making sense of all this is like examining prehistoric pottery shards . . .