Civil War Railroads

That was not done in freight terminals. Outdoors, at that time.

Cotton was a very lightweight material, so loading platforms were not so important.



American branchlines used to be like that. 2000 HP 2-8-0 steamers used to be standard, after the Civil War. My father once rode a local from Winston-Salem to Roanoke that stopped at farms to pick up milk canisters.

The photography on that show is spectacular, but they over-dramatize every little incident to an absurd degree. Real railroaders don't get into a panic on a daily basis. They've seen everything before, and know what to do.



I love the technology. Not sure why the concept failed. The last one ran between Atlanta and Detroit, carrying auto parts through Tennessee past the site of the CW's Great Locomotive Chase.
It was still alive in 2016 - when I retired.
 
That was not done in freight terminals. Outdoors, at that time.

Cotton was a very lightweight material, so loading platforms were not so important.



American branchlines used to be like that. 2000 HP 2-8-0 steamers used to be standard, after the Civil War. My father once rode a local from Winston-Salem to Roanoke that stopped at farms to pick up milk canisters.

The photography on that show is spectacular, but they over-dramatize every little incident to an absurd degree. Real railroaders don't get into a panic on a daily basis. They've seen everything before, and know what to do.



I love the technology. Not sure why the concept failed. The last one ran between Atlanta and Detroit, carrying auto parts through Tennessee past the site of the CW's Great Locomotive Chase.
In the late 1980's and early 90's I was on the engineering team that designed the Mark V RoadRailer (no built-in rail wheels) and the adapter bogie called Couplermate to eliminate the extra weight of the onboard rail wheels. Thrall Car where I worked sold the design to Wabash National, a highway trailer manufacturer in Lafayette, IN. When a Triple Crown train is moving along the rails it is extremely quiet because there is no slack in the coupling connection. This slack normally allows for train action - the yanking apart and pushing together of the cars which is very loud.
 
Just wondering if they used ambulance trains during the civil war, that would definitely have made sense especially considering that most CW battles were fought in and around railroads.

Edit:
Just did a google search for ambulance trains and the first hit was CWT, here's the thread, @chellers wrote some good stuff about ambulance trains or the lack of. https://civilwartalk.com/threads/ambulance-trains.98532/
The Confederates had Hospital Trains that were really just transport, under a doctor's supervision, of sick and injured soldiers. They were far too limited (usually 2 specialized cars per train) to make much difference after battles. There are numerous transcriptions on the subject on my site (www.csa-railroads.com).
 
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Excellent! That was one helluva feat. Not sure anybody but Stonewall could have pulled it off. It really is akin to Knox dragging the guns from Ticonderoga to Dorchester to help Washington run the British out of Boston.
I have no evidence that Jackson was involved in the locomotive hauling. It was accomplished by a Quartermaster Agent, later commissioned a QM Captain, Thomas R. Sharp. Jackson held his captured trains for 40 days without hauling a single car and 88 days without hauling a single locomotive South. When Sharp and his crew arrived, they moved out the first cars in 10 days.
 
That's big, for the time. The did prefer to push boxcars into buildings like that, to keep down the amount of smoke and steam inside, but they needed to be able to work from either end.

That building had a heck of a draft blowing through it that day. Note the steam from the safety valve, flowing nearly straight out the door, even though the valve was releasing it straight up with considerable force.

That reminds me of a similar oddball building in Baltimore, another design that didn't catch on. The B&O's first roundhouse had a roof over the turntable, which is normally out in the weather. The entire structure had (and still has) one big round roof over everything.
The B&O like the idea of the covered turntable. Their early roundhouse in Martinsburg (1845?) was covered and its replacement, in 1866, was and still is (though not in use).
 
Before the war, the city of Greensboro NC didn't want to grow or progress, so a rail link to Danville VA was locally resisted. During the war, an obvious need was seen for a north-south rail route that was further inland and therefore more easily defended, so the Greensboro to Danville line was pushed to completion, creating a second route from Atlanta to Richmond. Jefferson Davis used it in his retreat from Richmond at the end of the war. Today, it's a vital link from the Northeast to Atlanta and New Orleans.
The city of Greensboro had nothing to do with the lack of a connection. The State of NC and the big money and political men had invested heavily in the North Carolina RR, running from Charlotte (in the SW corner of the state) to Goldsborough (in the far E), with roads connecting Goldsborough to the Atlantic at Morehead City and Wilmington. If the Greensboro to Danville connection was made, much western and central NC produce (ie cotton) would have taken the connecting line (the Piedmont RR) from Greensboro to Norfolk. This would have been a huge loss of freight for the railroad paid for by the state's taxpayers.

The Piedmont RR was completed in later May, 1864.
 
It was still alive in 2016

And NS is likely to keep trying to bring it back. They've pushed it for years. The concept has too much merit to be allowed to die and stay dead. Well cars for double stacked containers are very expensive, and spine cars have issues with braking due to uneven weight distribution.

I used to see both types of Roadrailers on a regular basis when they ran through Greensboro to Atlanta. It was an auto parts train. Unfortunately, GM shut down that Atlanta facility.

The standard international shipping container was designed and first built in Greensboro, and the first customer to use them was RJ Reynolds in Winston-Salem.

Nobody knows who was the first to ever load a fully loaded wagon onto a flatcar, inventing intermodal, but it came early in railroad history. The practice remained rare until the labor cost of transloading became significant in the late sixties and early seventies.

The B&O like the idea of the covered turntable. Their early roundhouse in Martinsburg (1845?) was covered and its replacement, in 1866, was and still is (though not in use).

Wasn't there a matched pair in Martinsburg at one time? Seems like I remember seeing a round foundation of the same size, a few feet away. Or maybe that foundation was for the previous generation.

Covered turntables were great for keeping water out of the pit. I assume they dropped the idea when the buildings grew in size, increasing the cost, and wood turntable parts were replaced with steel.

B&O's Baltimore roundhouse has wooden flooring right up to the edge of the turntable, just like the original trolley shed in Scranton (rectangular building with a small turntable for short wheelbase 2-axle streetcars).
 
The city of Greensboro had nothing to do with the lack of a connection. The State of NC and the big money and political men...

You're talking about two groups of people with a considerable amount of overlap, not opposing groups.

Greensboro's reluctance to pursue growth opportunities over the years has been very well documented over the years.

the connecting line (the Piedmont RR) from Greensboro to Norfolk.

Don't know which line you're talking about there. Greensboro has had several options over the years for reaching Norfolk via connecting routes, but no direct line. In 1860, it already had reasonably good service to/from the port of Charleston SC.

NC's use of Norfolk has always been surprisingly limited, considering Norfolk's location and capacity. A lot of companies have always chosen to use Charleston instead, or even Savannah.
 
You're talking about two groups of people with a considerable amount of overlap, not opposing groups.

Greensboro's reluctance to pursue growth opportunities over the years has been very well documented over the years.



Don't know which line you're talking about there. Greensboro has had several options over the years for reaching Norfolk via connecting routes, but no direct line. In 1860, it already had reasonably good service to/from the port of Charleston SC.

NC's use of Norfolk has always been surprisingly limited, considering Norfolk's location and capacity. A lot of companies have always chosen to use Charleston instead, or even Savannah.
You seem to be confusing "over the years" with the CW. Read the 1858-1864 Raleigh newspapers and you will see the exact problems I have mentioned.
 
Nobody knows who was the first to ever load a fully loaded wagon onto a flatcar, inventing intermodal
I spent a significant portion of my career in the intermodal end of the business. Thrall's multi-unit articulated double-stack container cars were my babies. I have been in every major intermodal yard in the country from Jacksonville to Long Beach. TTX (formerly Trailer Train) was my biggest customer. I dealt a great deal with their engineers before, during and after the building of their cars. They are the 800 pound gorilla in the American freight rail industry, a non-profit entity owned jointly by all the Class I railroads.
 
You seem to be confusing "over the years" with the CW. Read the 1858-1864 Raleigh newspapers and you will see the exact problems I have mentioned.

The newspapers didn't necessarily always know what was going on inside John M. Morehead's mind, and he was the prime driving force behind most of NC's railroad progress during that era; first as governor of the state, then as president of the North Carolina Railroad. He may have promised to various people at various times that he was always going to favor NC ports, but then he pushed for the Danville connection, over the determined opposition of the Quaker voters who dominated Greensboro at that time, and over the objections of NC port operators. The Quakers preferred a calm, quiet, simple lifestyle, and did not equate urban growth with anything good. As a smart, forward thinking businessman, Morehead knew that trains would continue to grow bigger, longer, heavier, faster, and more important to the economy, and he could look at a map and see tremendous potential for growth associated with a direct north-south route from Washington to Atlanta and on to New Orleans. To him, more connections in more directions simply meant more growth in rail traffic and revenue, and eventually the port situation would sort itself out. The end result would be more jobs in the state's interior, and higher tax revenue for the state.

Morehead lived out his retirement years in downtown Greensboro, in a home on property adjoining the railroad. The house survives, as a museum.

Meanwhile, the Quaker no-growth mindset continued to play a major role in Greensboro's lack of development for more than a hundred years, as various large corporations were turned away. They even passed an ordinance against building an airport anywhere inside the city limits, back when every other city was in a rush to build their own.

Various economic interests in Norfolk, mostly tied to shipping companies, have tried several times over the decades to form stronger connections to NC, with very little success. The old original Norfolk Southern Railway that ran from Norfolk through Raleigh to Charlotte (closest connection to Greensboro was near Sanford) survived for many years, but was never high traffic. The NF&D ran along the state line, barely on the Virginia side; never high traffic, now abandoned.

Railroads other than the NCRR had their own agendas. The CW-era Wilmington and Weldon eventually became the Atlantic Coastline; always fiercely loyal to the port of Wilmington even though it did eventually acquire a low traffic connection to Norfolk, plus more heavily used lines to Charleston and Savannah. Predecessor lines that eventually became the Seaboard promoted trade through the port of Charleston because it was convenient to Hamlet Yard, the center of their empire. They reached as far west in NC as Monroe, near Charlotte, on their Atlanta line. The Virginia and Tennessee, later Norfolk and Western, built more branch lines over the Virginia state line into NC than any other company, but none of them evolved into high traffic routes.

Today, only two rail crossings of the NC-VA state line have enough traffic to justify a second track, and most of that traffic is just passing through NC on the way somewhere else. They are the old ACL south of Petersburg, and the NCRR / R&D / Southern Railway / Norfolk Southern line from Greensboro to Danville. State efforts to keep the port of Morehead City alive have been mostly given up, with poor results. What little port action we have left is about 90% in Wilmington. About five years ago, for the first time in decades, NS re-established a daily train between Greensboro and Norfolk, using the old N&W east of Lynchburg (can't turn right at Altavista). It's double stacked containers.
 

For a long time, all the stack train equipment I saw was TTX, but I've noticed recently quite a few cars showing up in BNSF paint. I suppose Chinese import containers have changed traffic patterns in ways that make participation in the TTX pool less favorable to them financially than it was in the past.
 
For a long time, all the stack train equipment I saw was TTX, but I've noticed recently quite a few cars showing up in BNSF paint. I suppose Chinese import containers have changed traffic patterns in ways that make participation in the TTX pool less favorable to them financially than it was in the past.
TTX still manages the cars with BNSF reporting marks. They also manage almost all the autoracks out there. Notice when you look at an autorack it is a railroad's rack on a TTX flatcar.
 
They also manage almost all the autoracks out there. Notice when you look at an autorack it is a railroad's rack on a TTX flatcar.

Yeah, it's about the only thing the old 90-foot flats get used for anymore. Lots of autorack traffic around here, due to a major regional unloading and storage facility on the northeastern edge of Winston-Salem. Cars from the Detroit area get routed through Bluefield and Roanoke; from the South and West, through Charlotte.

NS employees say they are responsible for maintenance on everything that is built on top of the original flat, but nothing else.
 
Yeah, it's about the only thing the old 90-foot flats get used for anymore. Lots of autorack traffic around here, due to a major regional unloading and storage facility on the northeastern edge of Winston-Salem. Cars from the Detroit area get routed through Bluefield and Roanoke; from the South and West, through Charlotte.

NS employees say they are responsible for maintenance on everything that is built on top of the original flat, but nothing else.
That is correct. RR's manage the rack - TTX manages the flats. The 89' flats were originally designed with bridge plates on the ends so that a string of cars could be "circus" loaded. They had collapsible trailer hitches for trailer ground clearance allowing the trailers to be pulled the whole length of the train by a yard hostler.
 
The Piedmont RR

I had forgotten all about that name being used by the Richmond and Danville for that particular subsidiary operation. Many of the historical maps show it as just another R&D line, which was its only owner until modern times, when all of the R&D became a part of the Southern Railway. I suppose the distinct name was useful for internal record keeping purposes, since the cars were configured for a different gauge than the rest of the R&D, for several years.

This article gives all the key dates: http://www.carolana.com/NC/Transportation/railroads/nc_rrs_piedmont.html

Fortunately, the important stuff is at the top. The rest is legal and political wrangling, in much greater detail than I'm willing to read.
 
The 89' flats were originally designed with bridge plates on the ends so that a string of cars could be "circus" loaded. They had collapsible trailer hitches for trailer ground clearance allowing the trailers to be pulled the whole length of the train by a yard hostler.

89 on paper, because of the federal limit, but more like 91 in reality. I've seen two 45' trailers loaded without touching. Creative arithmetic.

The old loading method became a victim of its own success. It took too long to load and unload long trains that way. Unfortunately, lifting equipment was expensive enough that a lot of smaller operations got shut down, such as the piggyback yards in Winston-Salem and Asheville.

You would like my HO scale collection. I have enough cars, trailers, and containers to set up a visual history of all the changes and advancements, through today, starting with the twin 40' trailers on 85' flats, state of the art when intermodal first became a big nationwide thing. I have some of the 89' cars that are configured for one 45' trailer and one 40'. They had to start lifting everything when they put two 45's on the same car, overhanging the drawbar on both ends, and the flip-down ramps were in the way. They had to go.

One of my personal favorite TTX cars had a short life, the 48' two axle spine car. It was very efficient, but they couldn't stretch to 53' and stay with the two-axle concept, due to curve and switch turning radius limitations. Europe has built a zillion two-axle cars in its history, but they've always been rare in the US, seen mostly in early generation Northeastern cabooses.

It was interesting to see the six- and ten-packs for 40' international containers make a big comeback, as domestics stretched to 53' and loading the longer cars with pairs of 40's became too wasteful.

And... I think I just put everybody in this thread to sleep except you. :sleep: Only the hardcore railheads will get it.
 
89 on paper, because of the federal limit, but more like 91 in reality. I've seen two 45' trailers loaded without touching. Creative arithmetic.

The old loading method became a victim of its own success. It took too long to load and unload long trains that way. Unfortunately, lifting equipment was expensive enough that a lot of smaller operations got shut down, such as the piggyback yards in Winston-Salem and Asheville.

You would like my HO scale collection. I have enough cars, trailers, and containers to set up a visual history of all the changes and advancements, through today, starting with the twin 40' trailers on 85' flats, state of the art when intermodal first became a big nationwide thing. I have some of the 89' cars that are configured for one 45' trailer and one 40'. They had to start lifting everything when they put two 45's on the same car, overhanging the drawbar on both ends, and the flip-down ramps were in the way. They had to go.

One of my personal favorite TTX cars had a short life, the 48' two axle spine car. It was very efficient, but they couldn't stretch to 53' and stay with the two-axle concept, due to curve and switch turning radius limitations. Europe has built a zillion two-axle cars in its history, but they've always been rare in the US, seen mostly in early generation Northeastern cabooses.

It was interesting to see the six- and ten-packs for 40' international containers make a big comeback, as domestics stretched to 53' and loading the longer cars with pairs of 40's became too wasteful.

And... I think I just put everybody in this thread to sleep except you. :sleep: Only the hardcore railheads will get it.
89'-6" striker face to striker face. Longer over coupler pulling faces.
 
Hope you guys (@Waterloo50, @DaveBrt, @Jimklag) know you have kicked a sleeping bear (I mean @Southern Unionist)! Let the games begin!

sleepingbear.jpg

Nuritas
 
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