Scale test cars are used to calibrate in-track scales that weigh freight cars. The car shown above was built in 1891 and served until the 1980s.
Jim Battle
Q The car in this picture was in the New York, Susquehanna & Western’s Little Ferry, N.J., yard in September 1978. Do you know if it is still in use? Also, the build date appears wrong. Can you confirm? – Jim Battle, Macedon, N.Y.
A Conrail donated this four-wheel scale test car to the Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania in Strasburg, Pa., in 1989. The build date is correct, as the car was originally built by the Pennsylvania Railroad in its Altoona, Pa., shops in June 1891, according to Larry DeYoung in “Conrail Color Guide to Freight Equipment, Volume 1.” Though functional in 1978, the car was likely pulled from service because of its outdated friction bearings. – Steve Sweeney
A Conrail donated this four-wheel scale test car to the Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania in Strasburg, Pa., in 1989. The build date is correct, as the car was originally built by the Pennsylvania Railroad in its Altoona, Pa., shops in June 1891, according to Larry DeYoung in “Conrail Color Guide to Freight Equipment, Volume 1.” Though functional in 1978, the car was likely pulled from service because of its outdated friction bearings. – Steve Sweeney
BAR had a few of these sadly they didn’t make it through the MM&A era.
We have some of the same equipment. We have a pair of trailers we use for testing. One is loaded and sealed and we know it weighs in at 58K exactly all day long. Why cement cured does not change its weight in a cube. Our other is empty and weighs in at 12K so we can calibrate the scale.
IIRC there was some (limited) talk of converting the bearings, but the weight was sufficiently low, and newer scale test cars had come into service, that she was retired.
Some of the newest ones use retired cabin car frames, or boxcar frames.
Railroading’s always got this fascinating mix of areas where technological advance brings rapid change (communications, motive power) and areas where the old stuff still does the job just fine (there are a whole lot of 100-year-old bridges and culverts still out there doing the jobs for which they were built). The stuff that’s changed radically gets replaced, but the stuff that still meets today’s requirements is left in service more or less indefinitely.
This car’s job was to weigh exactly 15 tons. There haven’t been any major technological advances in gravity since 1891 :-), so the car served for 98 years (on Class I carriers, no less!).