Re: Eight wheel Caboose on C&Sng?

Posted by Derrell Poole on Apr 08, 2015; 3:29am
URL: http://c-sng-discussion-forum.254.s1.nabble.com/Eight-wheel-Caboose-on-C-Sng-tp488p2020.html

Well, I've tried several times to determine when the folio drawings were devised. Perhaps someone who knows when the use of folios for RR equipment came into vogue could give us a general idea when that happened. But to determine from this particular set I have failed.

I am a professional drafter with roots in the traditional art of drafting when pin and ink were physically taken in hand and applied to Mylar and Velum - the replacement products of drafting Linen. Rule number one in drafting - the correct depiction of the drawing is important but paled to the importance of the data - that is the correctness of the numbers and notes. AND. Never draft more in the morning than you can erase in the afternoon. (Hopefully a picture that applies to the folio drawings is becoming more clear at this point.)

The Folio drawings are diagrams (as you've noted) - not precision drawings. The numbers and notes are what is truly important.  Since we don't know from whence the drawing came we cannot say they were not derived (traced) from earlier diagrams of similar purpose. Moreover the inconsistent practices of updating these drawings confound our efforts to date them. In some cases it looks as though a new sheet was drawn to replace an old sheet while in other cases the old sheet may have simply been updated to reflect new numbers and notes (you understand that I'm not particularly talking about a revised car number so much as a revised dimension). And then there are "missing" sheets such as those for 1002, 1010 even 1009. At least I don't have them. John Maxwell produced drawings from folio sheets that apparently came from George Lundberg but they are not in the currently available sets that I know of; they include certain data not provided on the currents set. So it would seem more than one version was floating around the RR domain at any given time. As to what happened to sheets we don't have? Were they perhaps pulled and destroyed along with cars that were retired? Or did they just never exist in the first place?

I think your thoughts that cars were rebuilt as onezie - twozies holds substantial merit. Trying to determine the order in which they were rebuilt seems a tough row to hoe - we need AFEs to determine that. Still it is fun to speculate. I think we need to kinda divorce the ideas of car rebuilding from new car construction Common Standard drawings. The only common standard between the Drawing and the rebuilds seems to be the wheel base of 9 feet - more or less. It could even be that rebuilding of the existing cars began before 1908. But to my knowledge no AFEs have turned up to substantiate that. So I think there is the possibility that you are right about what cars were rebuilt together - such as 306 and 310. The two cars closest to the Common Standard were 308 and 309 so we might believe they were rebuilt together perhaps at the time the Standards were being developed. Indeed they could very well have been the examples for the drawing. I've sorta thought - without much conviction - that the long cars were later rebuilds but you offer worthy reasoning for the two B end lookouts being rebuilt toward the last.

WEll... best I can do for anyone on this topic.

Hol is working on illustrations and photos for the Book. The Book is huge. I once had a printout of the files of an earlier draft that measured in feet thick - and that wasn't the whole thing. Keep in mind they were printed on one side only, but still...

It will someday soon be available on DVD and we have encouraged Hol to announce and advertise the book here on the Blog. It is an invaluable work in many respects but especially to understand not just the narrow gauge but the entire Colorado Road. It offers much explanation as to what happened to the narrow gauge. I've read most of it - but not all of it - it is the encyclopedia of "the Colorado Road".