Everything else being equal...

There is always modelers

I agree with Prof Klyzlr

See title

50 footers

Generally no.  50 ft cars were used for autos, auto parts and were commonly equipped with interior fixtures (load dividers, DF bars, auto racks, etc) that made them less suitable for grain.  For example your two 50 footers in the picture are equipped with hydracushion underframes, very expensive underframes for cushioning the loads against slack action.  Wonderful for appliances, useless for grain.  A car with that equipment would be brand spanking new in your era.  The whoever assigned that car to hauling one $500 revenue load of grain when it could be hauling multiple trips of $2000 a car appliances or parts would have some 'splainin to do. 

You also have to look at the door.  They look like they are 10 ft doors.  The way they ship grain ina boxcar is to nail a grain door across the lower 2/3 of the doorway.  A grain door is a heavy duty sheet of brown paper reinforced with steel bands.  On a 10 ft door, the weight of the grain would cause the grain door to bulge out far enough tthey might not be able to slide the door closed.  The ideal grain car was a "tall, skinny door boxcar".  A 10 to 10'6" IH car with a 6 ft wide door.

It wasn't until the 1970's or so that 50 ft cars became the norm.  You also have to consider that a 50 ft car may not match the unloading location either.

Also the covered hopper you have shown there wouldn't have been hauling grain either.  It would be used for cement or some other commodity, but not grain.  Key identifiers for a grain car are longish hatches down the center line of the car.  The multiple hatches on each side scream cement or some other fine ganular heavy commodity.

40-footers

Another point on 40-foot boxes for grain -- grains are more dense than general merchandise so the car would hit its weight limit before it filled up -- Jeff Wilson's good book on grain traffic has photos of cars marked with interior load lines for wheat, barley, milo etc that are more than half the height of a car, but not as much as three-fourths. The 50-foot car was also significantly less common up through the 1960s.

Don't rule out the 50'...

Wow!

Thanks for all the great information! This gives me a lot to think about, I never really considered door types or sizes.  I'll need to look through my box cars and determine just what I have and how they can be used, or what I need that I don't have?

I want to get my elevator and grain bins finished so I can place them on the module and scenic at least a part of the module.  But, I need to know where to place the elevator.  Thanks again! If I keep asking questions, I might learn something.

Forty Foot Box Very Most Common

Steve,

Visually, Prof Klyzr has it right--allow the extra room, but figure your elevator will see mostly 40 ft. box cars in the 1950's.  The prime reasons are two-fold.  The 40 foot car was the general purpose car.  Further, at the beginning of the 1950's, the standard freight car journal resulted in fifty (later raised to 55) ton capacity.  As pointed out by Graham Line's post, grains "gross out" (reach the weight capacity) of a forty foot car well before  "cubing out" (reaching the volume limit of the car.  A 50 foot car would be a waste of extra volume.

As the 1950's went along, 70 ton cars became more common, typically resulting  in the move to 50 foot cars.  That stated, grain was a very low profit business, as Dave Husman posts.  The 50 foot cars built in the 1950s tended to be specialized cars or cars intended for higher profit services.  Yes, NP and GN had special design 50 foot box cars that provided wide openings for their lumber traffic, but could become a grain car by putting a grain door (those reinforced paper or wood plank coverings stretched across a six foot opening --the sliding door).  

If you seek the typical, it will be 40 foot box cars.

By the way, no hatches are needed on the car roofs for grain.  The grain was loaded via a spout through the opening above the grain door where the grain door extended up only, say, 6 to 8 feet, depending on grain type.  It was all simple and cheap.

Bill Decker

I have a plan

Bill, thanks for door loading info, I assumed they loaded from the roof hatches. I'll position the elevator to make room for door loaded 50' box cars and an end of track bumper, but I'll mostly use 40' box cars. Dave H, thanks for the Hydra-Cushion info, I'll limit those to the freight depot.

Hopefully I'll get a few hours to do some modeling this weekend, I'd like to get some structures and scenery on the module soon.

Last boxcar grain train

The last boxcar grain train I saw was mostly if not all 40 foot cars, that was in late 1979, in Kansas, the train was going to Mexico with corn.  I can't really say I saw the whole train, it was night and I was sorta focused on fixing the the car with the burnt off journal (which should be a tip off they weren't the best cars) but from what I remember looking at the consist, it was all 40 footers.  The last 40 footers I saw in regular service where a string of MP "Route of the Eagle" boxcars used to haul bulk sugar from Galveston to Sugarland, TX, this was in the early 80's.  We used to joke that the Houston-Galveston local (#329, the "Salty") needed 3 engines, 2 to pull the train and one to keep air in the sugar boxes.  In the mid 1980's the 40 fters were retired and replaced with ex-RBOX 50 ft cars.  A boxcar used for raw sugar loading is pretty much ruined for shipping anything else without having multiple power washes or sand blasting.

Here is a car diagram for a

Here is a car diagram for a 40 ft single sheath boxcar with the grain loading lines marked on it:

Looks like they loaded a 40 foot, 40 ton car with wheat 5' 6 1/4"

Corn, rye and flax to 5' 11"

Barley to 6' 10 1/4 inches

and oats to the roof if needed.

I was surprised to see that the depths to load were measured in fractions of an inch.

Jeff White

Alma, IL

50' grain boxcars

I have pics I took, inside and out, of GT ex-auto double door boxcars that have grain heights marked on walls as to how high to load the different grains. The end auto doors and one side door on each side are welded shut.

So these cars were for sure used in the 70's and 80's.

Terry Harrison

grain doors

in the summer of 1966 i worked for a grain door factory, mostly unloading and stacking 2" rough sawn greenish lumber.  the factory was in Spokane Washington and called Webster Lumber Company.  i believe they had another location doing the same thing.  anyway, the rough lumber was loaded almost always into 40' boxcars, board by board, as high as could be and still allow a man, me, to crawl into the car and begin shoving the wood out of the car to the "stacker" person below.  the stack would be started by using three 4x timbers placed crossways.  this was to allow the forklift to remove the completed stack and store it, waiting for the actual production of the grain doors.  The operation began with a "re-saw" operation.  a large bandsaw would split the 2" boards down to two 1" boards.  there was no further finishing.  The 1" boards were then graded and sorted. next they were cut to length, with short boards going crosswise on one layer of each end.  the next action, on the main assembly line, would be to combine two layers of 1" boards with cross boards on one layer at each end.  this was done on a conveyor pretty much by humans.  the conveyor would take this loose assembly down the line to some sort of tamper/straightener which immediately fed into a power nailer.  the now nailed grain door was edge trimmed to size and stenceled with the webster info. the waste lumber and scraps was conveyed to a "beehive" burner.  they were sized about 18" wide by  6' long to be nailed up across the boxcar doorways.  the competition was the paper and strap thing previously described.

These grain doors were meant to be and were re-used, a lot.  you could find stacks of them around grain elevators in those times.  i lived mostly in Minneapolis Minnesota in that time, certainly a milling town, and one did not need to look very  hard to find these stacked doors.  So, don't forget the detail of stacks of new raw lumber doors and used weather lumber doors somewhere around the elevator!

Grain Cars

  The comment about maxing out on weight capacity before cubing out on area is the key here.  A typical 40' box car has about 3500 to 4000 cubic ft of space inside.  Wheat is about 48 lbs/cubic ft per most USDA info.  Based on 3500 cubic ft, the load would be about 168,000 lbs - Far in excess of the normal 100,000 lb(50 ton) capacity of a normal 40' box car.  Loading the car to the 5' level will result in a 100,000 lb load.  A typical 50' car(also 50 ton capacity) will be upwards of 250,000 lbs - way over the limit.  The grain 'do not load above this line' will need to be lower.  Plus, as already noted - a double door car needs to have one door sealed.  A 40' box car with a 6' door was the perfect grain car in the steam and transition era.

Jim

Grain Car doors

Agreed.  40' box with a 6 ' door.  That is the size that the wooden grain doors were designed for.  there were ways to double up the grain doors if you have a wider door.  but the 6' was by far the most common sized door used in grain service.

Howard Garner