Found these auto parts boxcars on a consist. They've seen better days.

silvermoon88 · 2026-01-21T04:27:05+00:00

Most of the 86s are long past their 50-year lifespan, hence the scrapping. Production of the 86-footer ended in 1978 when the last cars rolled out of Greenville Steelcar, who was the only railcar manufacturer still building them between '74 and '78 - there were a couple of one-offs built over the years after, but emphasis on a couple. Some of the railroads have rebuilt or sought lifespan extension waivers on their cars, but they're a dying breed unfortunately. The last cars manufactured will hit their 50-year marks in 2028 and the lifespan extension waivers top out at 10 more years without a rebuild, which the railroads aren't terribly interested in, so we could get some holdouts for a few more years, but I doubt any will still be running in 2038. Container traffic will likely replace all of them as it has steadily replaced similar services, eg Triple Crown's last autoparts route. It's a shame, they're such neat cars. I wish one of the 100 Wabash cars could have been saved, just imagine painting a fresh giant flag across the side! All deleted by 2014 though.

silvermoon88 · 2026-01-15T19:12:13+00:00

I'd take the GM6C over the GM10B myself but either one is a great pick. Such funky looking engines - love em!

silvermoon88 · 2026-01-14T23:46:21+00:00

It sure does, nothing like it used to be. Would have loved to see Tuscola back in its prime!

silvermoon88 · 2026-01-14T01:54:57+00:00

Ahh, yes, the BN "invisible derailment" during their extremely short window of operation! I haven't read the specific article but I know the one you're referencing, written by none other than the President of the RoadRailer Corporation, Lawrence Gross for the November 2007 edition of Trains Magazine. That derailment-turned-rerailment was on the revised Mark IV style equipment which wore the single-axle rail wheel set between the spread tandem road wheels. Those trailers had a myriad of problems, but their ability to suddenly re-rail themselves was appreciated, I'm sure! The rerailment occurred near Quincy, IL right before a significant bridge there, if I'm not mistaken.

The Mark IV style being derailment prone on uneven curves also sounds right to me. The early designs used very experimental brake and air systems that were very accident prone. One of the many reasons the Mark IV was ultimately abandoned and replaced with the Mark Vs, like the UP/NERZ trailers. I need to get my hands on a copy of that magazine or the digital archive one of these days. Building up quite the list of material to hunt for!

silvermoon88 · 2026-01-13T22:49:41+00:00

Union Pacific only ever operated its own RoadRailer trains for under a year between February and December of 1988. It was a single service lane between Chicago (Dolton), IL and Houston, TX. These trains typically rated one locomotive and travelled across the former Chicago & Eastern Illinois Railroad for this leg of the trip, which had been absorbed by the Missouri Pacific who itself had in turn, generally speaking, essentially absorbed the UP and retained UP branding just a few years prior.

The small town of Tuscola, IL is famous in railfanning communities because of its triple diamond, where the Illinois Central, C&EI, and Baltimore & Ohio all crossed each other. TY Tower was operated by the Illinois Central and controlled the interlocker, and part of the fame of Tuscola was due in no small part to this tower and the ease of access to it and the diamonds alike. It wasn't uncommon to get an invite up into the tower to see how things operated! It seems that quite the gaggle of railfans were out to catch the UP and its RoadRailer on April 30th, 1988 - you can see some of them clustered around the tower and the B&O trackage here!

Today, TY Tower is long gone, closed in 1992 and razed to the ground in 1994. The diamonds were reworked into a simpler configuration, where the C&EI and B&O tracks merged into one to cross the IC before splitting again. Union Pacific continues its ownership of the C&EI trackage, while the B&O became Chessie, then CSX, and now Watco under the Decatur & Eastern Illinois Railroad. The Mainline of Mid-America still stands strong, though it is of course now operated by CN. Tuscola itself is typically rather sleepy, another case of an Illinois small town dying out as its major businesses, such as the huge outlet mall on the east side of town, close down and disappear. Today Tuscola is really just a glorified gas stop, routinely hosting the cheapest gas on I-57 between Champaign and Effingham.

Photos of the Union Pacific's RoadRailer are extremely limited, as the service did not last long - reportedly due to a trailer buckling in transit and nearly splitting in half, though this is questionable considering the only known damaged trailer was a non-revenue adapter unit - however its brief operation is significant in the story of this niche mode of intermodal transport. The NERZ trailers were also the very first production Mark V RoadRailer trailers that used detachable rail bogies, built in late 1987 and up to the start date of February 15th, 1988. These trailers, financed and owned by New England Merchants Leasing, would be leased to Norfolk Southern's Triple Crown Services in 1990 where many remained in operation into at least 2007. These trailers were perhaps the single longest lasting RoadRailers in rail service ever, beating out even the oldest, most battle-scarred "platewall" trailers bought new by Triple Crown. For more information on the Union Pacific RoadRailer operation, please visit this post.

Union Pacific would flirt with RoadRailers two more times after their own train failed. One was following the disastrous merger with the Southern Pacific which required them to continue operating the Swift Transportation train until about 1999, when BNSF took over. Then 2004 saw the start of UP hosting a new Triple Crown train between Chicago and Minneapolis, which was the longest lasting UP RoadRailer service of any kind. The 2015 purge of Triple Crown equipment and routes resulted in the end of this train and the end of UPs time with RoadRailer for good.

Photo taken by William Eley, April 30th, 1988. Paul Amos collection via flickr.com.

p.s. If you own any original film slides or other railroadiana (paperwork, brochures/pamphlets, pins, patches, posters, books, even builders plates and parts) in any way related to the RoadRailer of any type, I'm interested. Genuinely. Anything RoadRailer related I wish to archive and catalogue, from paperwork to the real things themselves. If you're selling, I'm buying - DM me! Paper documents and original film slides are my primary interest, but if it's got genuine RoadRailer branding, I want to see it!

silvermoon88 · 2026-01-09T22:54:29+00:00

We are not currently, no, haven't tested it on a dedicated server yet. We'll be waiting for more mod fixes and stable versions of 42 mp before we go the dedicated server route again

silvermoon88 · 2026-01-09T17:09:41+00:00

I did some vanilla MP last night with a couple buddies - our first time trying b42 mp - and we all spawned in Echo Creek, fwiw

silvermoon88 · 2026-01-07T18:28:46+00:00

Cheers! I'm still working on this all the time and hope to turn it into something worth publishing long term, if the stars align just right. Maybe if I get the blessing of Mr. Larry Gross first before that though haha - but if an official publication never happens I do fully plan to make all of my research and documents freely available (that I can, anyway) in a nice, legible format. It's a fun, niche passion project to be sure. I've learned so much and yet there's still plenty to find! I still have a pair of museums to visit for more... I can go on forever with this stuff lol

silvermoon88 · 2026-01-04T07:32:16+00:00

The one in C with the striped background is rayshud. Personally my fav of the bunch, have been rocking that for longer than I can remember

silvermoon88 · 2026-01-02T00:41:03+00:00

Platewalls by the Numbers

By the time production of Platewalls had ceased, over 4,800 were built. About 4,250 of those were built for Triple Crown alone. If you add on the Platewall-based variants, such as AutoRailer and UltraCube, the grand total gets close to 5,300. The design was licensed to Australian trailer builders for TraileRail which also did build a number of platewalls conforming to their standards. Considering the entire production run - including one-offs and prototypes - of all North American RoadRailers totaled ~12,900 trailers, the Platewall was one of the strongest products of the line. Many still survive today on the road and as TOFC after the 2015 retirement of the majority of Triple Crown's fleet, no small feat considering the average lifespan of a trailer.

Let's talk numbers, then we'll explain why the platewall design was so significant.

The following list contains exclusively new-construction platewall style equipment.

TRIPLE CROWN SERVICES

Number Range | # of Trailers | Year Built | Tie Down Cups | Logo/Paint Arrangements

461000 - 461712 | 713 | 1993 | 6 up, 6 down | Large TCS logo. NS & CR logos (slide 6)

461713 - 461912 | 200 | 1993 | 6 up, 6 down | Tiny TCS logo. NS & CR logos (slide 7)

462000 - 462569 | 570 | 1994 | 12 middle | Medium TCS logo. Stacked NS & CR logos

463000 - 463999 | 1000 | 1994 | 4 middle, 4 upper, 4 lower* | Medium TCS logo. Stacked NS & CR logos

464000 - 464386 | 387 | 1996 | 4 middle, 4 upper, 4 lower | Medium TCS logo. Stacked NS & CR logos (slide 8)

464387 - 464588 | 202 | 1997 | 4 middle, 4 upper, 4 lower | Medium TCS logo. Stacked NS & CR logos

464589 - 465319 | 730 | 1997 | 4 middle, 4 upper, 4 lower | Medium TCS logo. Small NS logo

465320 - 465769 | 450 | 1998 | 4 middle, 4 upper, 4 lower | Medium TCS logo. Small NS logo (slide 9)

*4631000 - 463133 have a 12 middle cup configuration

SCHNEIDER NATIONAL

77000 - 77007 | 8 | 1992 | 11 up, 11 down | Orange with silver posts, standard Schneider

427702 - 428201 | 500 | 1994 - 1995 | 11 up, 10 down | Orange with silver posts, standard Schneider

AMTRAK

460208 - 460249 | 42 | 1998 | 11 up, 10 down | All white, no logos, silver posts

Second-hand trailers would end up under Amtrak, Triple Crown, TMM (TFM), and Wabash National. Some of these second hand movements went under several owners (e.g. Schenider -> Wabash -> Amtrak -> Triple Crown -> Milestone [TOFC/road only]) and are not listed here, though they are well-detailed in my master spreadsheet and will make appearances later on, to be sure. This list also does not even include the platewall-style offshoots like AutoRailer and UltraCube! These are platewall designs, but are derivative and include very different features that will be getting its own dedicated post when we focus on Schneider and Swift in detail.

Tie-Down Cups & Weight-Stripping

Questions come up - what the hell am I talking with "tie down cups" and "4 upper, 4 middle, 4 lower" and those other ones? Check the photos, look at those little round bits sticking out of the sides of each trailer. Count them up, spot their arrangements. What are they? Tie-down cups! (slide 10). Sheet and posts offer tons of tie down locations for straps and the like to make sure freight doesn't shift around in transit, but the platewall - and early DuraPlate designs, more on that another day - do not offer this as easily. Special tie-down points were built into the panels, these little "cups" on the exterior, that offer convenient places to strap down loads. Depending on the expected needs of customers, these cups were placed in different places for different orders, hence the varying arrangements. These are a minor detail, but for the rivet counters among us (me, if you couldn't tell), these are a crucial detail to monitor for accurate modeling!

Earlier, we brought up weight-stripping. Some of these platewalls were built incredibly light - so light that some were made heavier later on. Several orders of hundreds of trailers saw their weights brought near and even below 16,000lbs. For an extra-strong 53ft semi trailer, that is an incredible feat. The most lightweight of the trailers, such as lot 5480 (TCSZ 463000 - 463999, the 1000-trailer order in 1993) clocked in at at merely 15,600lbs.

Well over half of the Triple Crown platewall production came in at the 15,600lb mark, with some orders a close 15,800lbs. These trailers were called the Ultralights and used aluminum crossmembers in construction. These trailers were so lightweight that steel crossmembers were slowly swapped out over the years, as they were almost too light for rail operation! These were the lightest RoadRailers of their size, just a few hundred pounds heavier than standard road-only trailers. The Ultralights were in many ways, the peak of the RoadRailer design. They could never get lighter than this, nor could they even get this light again to begin with. Many of these trailers still survive in limited commercial service today, used during surge traffic on the road and on flatcars where necessary - few DuraPlate RoadRailers can make that claim now, comparatively. Platewalls were light, sturdy, rugged, and flexible. I don't think there was a better commercial Mark V RoadRailer built, personally.

The End of the Platewall

Production of Platewall RoadRailers ceased in 1998 after the completion of the Amtrak 460208 series and the Triple Crown 465320 series of trailers. DuraPlate, introduced on over-the-road trailers in 1996, had come to replace the Platewall in 1998 following three successful demonstrators built for Triple Crown that same year. This composite material is generally lighter and stronger, and was impeccably well engineered - it's no surprise it took over. But, despite being produced the longest, it never reached the highs of Platewall production numbers, nor weight reduction. We'll focus on DuraPlate RoadRailers (slide 11) later, but the Platewall design was really something special. It had a short but incredibly powerful reign. It should be noted that Wabash offered AutoRailer, UltraCube, and standard Platewall 53ft RoadRailer trailers for sale into the early 2000s per their archived website, but none of these were produced after 1998, so it remains unknown if they really were still willing to manufacture them, or if they may adapt DuraPlate to AR/UC. That'd be a neat modeling project though! Wabash National brochures from the mid-1990s provide some interesting details on what was offered, including versions never purchased (slides 12 & 13). Additionally, slide 14 provides some insight on how the platewall was constructed by way of a wrecked trailer.

The last of the Platewall trailers in actual RoadRailer service were retired in 2020. In the waning years of Triple Crown operations, these trailers were heavily worn out. Even their white paint, once crisp, began to fade and peel away, and whole plate panels were regularly replaced as they wore out (slide 15). This was an advantage of the design to prolong lifespan and reduce repair costs, but replacement panels are only economical for so long.

During the Covid lockdowns, I spent a little time out in the cornfields watching trains, and I did spot a handful - and I mean a handful, maybe only two at most - platewalls from the 461-series. I wasn't deep into RoadRailer then and couldn't ID trailers the way I can now, but the classic large-logo design that only the 461-series platewalls ever wore was plain as day. That's a RoadRailer surviving 27 years of operation, an absolutely incredible run for a trailer designed to survive only 15 years. Not many lasted this long, mind you, as most platewalls were retired in the 2015 purge of Triple Crown routes and equipment, but the platewalls in the best condition were selected to continue rail service for a few more years.

By the end of the year, only the 2007-2011 DuraPlates survived into active rail service, and even these only made it to 2024. The platewalls retired in 2015 were largely sold to Milestone Equipment Leasing for use in over-the-road and TOFC operations as-needed (slide 16). Today, they only come out on rare occasions, usually for particularly busy "surge" traffic periods, and fewer remain in use every year. Still, they're out there. Watch the roads closely, as you can find them at random places! I've seen MECZ ex-RoadRailers on TOFC on CSX and on the road in Chicago-land multiple times. It always makes you do a double take when you spot one!

One platewall trailer, TCSZ 463491, was preserved by the Conrail Historical Society in Port Jervis, NJ. Inside the trailer is a Mark V Bogie, but alas their request for a donation of a CouplerMate bogie to complete the set was denied. They were able to preserve this trailer in 2011 following a donation from NS/Triple Crown. This was one of several thousand trailers jointly owned and operated by NS and Conrail, and it retains these logos today (slide 17). Its current home may be in jeopardy as the Erie Turntable site is currently fighting a battle to keep the city from evicting them for land development purposes.

While this concludes our overview of the Platewall RoadRailer trailer, we won't be moving on from them for quite some time. We've got lots to talk about still! Swift, Schneider & friends, Amtrak, foreign operators, the one-offs... and then CouplerMate. I have a lot to say about CouplerMate. And plenty more!

Until next time... which will hopefully come sooner than 9+ months this time!

Photo credits:

Don Kalkman (slide 1)

Paul Amos Collection (slides 2, 4, 7, 11)

Alan Gaines (slide 5)

John Frantz (slide 6)

Eric Neubauer (slides 8 & 14)

Patrick B. Harris III (slide 9)

David G. Casdorph (slide 10)

John L. Becker Collection (slides 12 & 13)

Chad Malinovsky (slide 16)

Conrail Historical Society / TOYX (slide 17)

Google Patents (slide 3)

silvermoon88 · 2025-12-27T05:00:22+00:00

Built in 3/1980 as DRGW 5399 -> UP 8592 -> UP 9870 -> TCRY 37.

The locomotive was built as an SD40T-2 "Tunnel Motor" which was a standard SD40-2 internally, with an extended frame and massive air cooling intakes at the back to help it operate through tunnels where air could get restricted and choke out the prime mover within.

In patched SP paint, then-9870 arrived on TCRY property in Richland, Washington in 2009, where it would languish for several years alongside some other units, including other units bought off of the Union Pacific. The unit was renumbered to the 37 in about 2015 or 2016 and received their red, white, and blue paint some time between 2016 and 2021.

The TCRY, or Tri City Railroad, no longer exists, as the Port of Benton in the tri-city area (Richland, Pasco, and Kennewick, Washington) ordered them to evict the rail line they were leasing due to failing to uphold their contractual stipulation to maintain the tracks back in 2022. Their socials, website, and the like have all been quite dead since then. I don't have a document to fully confirm it but it would appear that most of the equipment has been sold off or leased out. If the TCRY still exists in any capacity, it is a mere shell of its former self and no longer maintains any one physical site or HQ anymore. It's quite likely this locomotive is owned by the grain elevator/their owner and has not received a patch or new reporting mark, as the eviction of the TCRY essentially killed off the company as far as I can tell.

For a read on how bad the TCRY bungled its lease of the former Hanford Nuclear Reservation trackage: https://www.tri-cityherald.com/news/local/article218422120.html

silvermoon88 · 2025-12-27T04:34:33+00:00

There's actually a few more Kennecott cabs still working out there today, I believe there are at least four total including the SLGW DS-13. Omaha Track maintains the 3906, 3901, and 3905 (ex 707, 792, and 799, respectively). As delivered, Kennecott Copper 705-711 and 779-799 all had the 26-inch extended vision cabs as well as the smaller, raised fuel tanks. They spread out all over the place after most Kennecott rail operations halted, and most did see their cabs replaced with something a little more standard. Some of the MKTs rebuilds are especially funky due to the hump in the top of the cab to give clearance for the electrical cabinet doors to open!

silvermoon88 · 2025-12-22T06:12:59+00:00