Reinforcing side stakes for 40 foot solid bottom gondolas, GN 72500-72749
Reinforcing side stakes applied to GN 72500-72749 gondolas.
In 1952, the Great Northern Railway purchased 250 nominal forty-foot long ‘mill gondolas’, from American Car and Foundry, cars 72500 to 72749. These were GN’s first solid bottom gondola cars, as opposed to the approximately 2,700 nominal forty-foot long drop bottom gondolas on the roster in 1952. As delivered these cars were painted mineral red. They would prove to be the only forty-foot long ‘mill gons’ the Great Northern ever owned.
About January 1, 2023 the NPRHA will offer resin model kit of these cars, which were Northern Pacific 59000 to 59499 purchased from ACF in 1952-53. The kit includes the full body casting, appropriate small parts, and a pair of Tahoe TWM 70 ton ASF A-3 ride control trucks. Couplers and decals are not included.
Reinforcing side stakes were added to cars 72500 to 72749 beginning in September of 1957 to strengthen the sides of the cars. Four larger and longer reinforcing side stakes that extended below the sides were added per car, one over the fifth original stake in from each end on both sides. Cars were repainted to vermillion red when the ribs were upgraded. To date we have not seen a photo of a car with upgraded side stakes in the original paint scheme or a photo of a car in vermillion red with slanted lettering without the upgraded side stakes.
Our custom cast reinforcing side stakes are designed to be used as replacement side stakes on the HO scale Sunshine Models resin kit of GN cars 72500-72749, and for any future releases of that resin kit, including the current NPRHA kit. They also fit the Accurail gondolas if you’re using those models as a stand-in for the GN prototypes.
Correct Great Northern decals are available from National Scale Car http://www.nationalscalecar.com for $7.00. The set includes the as delivered lettering and the slant-serif lettering introduced in 1956.
ADDITIONAL HISTORY
Beginning in 1968 some of these cars were painted black with simplified goat heralds.
In 1955 17 cars were assigned to container service and renumbered 72750 to 72770, not all numbers used. The railroad owned and supplied the ten 145 cubic foot containers used per car. These cars were used to haul ferro-chrome from Chromium Mining & Smelting Co. at Mead, Washington and ferro-silicon from Keokuk Electro Metals Co. at Rock Island, Washington to customers in Detroit and Pittsburg. In 1956 the 21 cars then in service were equipped with roller bearing trucks at a cost of $23,000 due to excessive number of hot boxes on these cars which were loaded to their load limit. By 1964 the container series had been expanded to 72750 to 72773, for a total of 24 GN container cars.
SP&S purchased 200 such cars from ACF in the same general time period.