On May 20, 2022, at 4:24 PM, Alexander Smart <agfsmart@...> wrote:

Hello

I am a SRHA member in Oban, Scotland, UK.

I would like to find more information about the Southern freight operations around City Yard Memphis, Tennessee in the 1960s. This was inspired by Zone B of a Southern Railway Track Map and Terminal Survey, Memphis TN, May 1980, which I found on a Donnie Dixon link from the SRHA.

I realise that Southern wasn’t a major player in the Memphis area, but it will allow me me interchange and transfer runs with, the IC, L&N, Frisco, Cotton Belt etc with appropriate locos and cars.

I have been constructing a small switching layout in HO based on the above, but would like to rebuild it into a larger, more accurate layout with the correct track plan, correct industries, accurate locos and rolling stock.
So far I have Memphis Furniture Mfg.Co.,Central Chemical, McDowell Industries Inc(Semmes Bag Co.), a team track and possibly Parts Inc. Getting photos of these industries has been almost impossible so far, even on the Internet.
This is the area along the Southern branch up from Forrest Yard, from Sledge St. to Linden Street.

However I need more information especially 1960s era photos of the exact area with industries, length of spurs, trackage etc.
In addition I would welcome details of switching moves, transfer runs to other yards, locos used and rosters etc.
Did Southern allow other roads to make transfer runs to City Yard or just to Forrest Yard?
I would love to justify visits from other roads’ locos to my yard.

I have been using Mike Condren’s Memphis Railroad Pages as a good source of maps and photos but have now exhausted this source.

If any members live in the Memphis area or have a knowledge of the above, I would welcome any information or suggestions.

Apologies for such a long post!

Kind regards

Sandy Smart
#9023

On Apr 24, 2022, at 2:22 PM, George Eichelberger <geichelberger@...> wrote:

John:

The example I posted shows only a fraction of the content in the material Marvin accumulated. (As a Sou-NS employee he had access to railroad files and most certainly volunteered when material was to be disposed of.) Anyone that attends the joint SRHA-L&NHS-RPM at TVRM in Sept/Oct is welcome to visit the archives building a get the $.05 tour.

I’ve attached another example. Admittedly, it’s the kind of thing only a “hard core” modeler or railfan would care about but as you are both…..

There are dozens of Diesel assignments, modifications, retirements, etc. in Marvin’s notebooks. The SR diesel books I am doing will include many photos but the text goes far beyond that. (A “teaser” for the FT Introduction was in TIES some time ago if anyone wants to see an example of what the books will look like. The draft was getting to nearly 500 pages (to large to print/sell because of cost) so it’ll be split into multiple books to get them done and available at a reasonable price.)

Ike

PS Re storage on the .io groups. We are in the process of putting a Networked Storage system in place. (Multiple disks, fully redundant, etc.)  Anyone is: welcome to help defray its cost and help get it organized and our data loaded. Also the local area SRHA-L&NHS-TVRM network, including fiber optic connections between multiple TVRM buildings project is moving ahead..all opportunities to learn and help! We have not established who/how/costs to get to everything but the “NAS” will be our on-line repository, not the .io group.

On Apr 24, 2022, at 1:27 PM, John Willis <willisjc@...> wrote:

George,

If all the information is of the same quality, Mr. Black's contribution is to be lauded in the highest terms. Thanks for sharing this sample.

These jpg's can be resized to 800x600 with no discernible readability concerns. The file saving is immense. From megabytes to a couple hundred kilobytes. I use Irfanview, but most graphic viewers have similar resizing tools              ( virtually every type of graphic is handled by this program with the ability to save into whichever format needed or wanted ). I also use this when posting graphics to reduce bandwidth for those who may not be able to easily receive large files  (The courteous thing to do ). Large files are for archival uses and where storage capacity is of less or no concern.

John


John C. Willis

On Apr 24, 2022, at 12:02 PM, George Eichelberger <geichelberger@...> wrote:

We have not given sufficient "thanks" to the amazing amount of Southern Railway Diesel locomotive research material Marvin Black accumulated for his planned book on SR diesels. Among many other items, Marvin filled more than 100 3-ring binders with copies and original material, most of it original and certainly one of a kind, with letters and memos about every aspect of the railroad's transition to diesel poser, loco specifications, design changes, etc., etc. His material, along with the volume of material SRHA obtained from the Engineering, Mechanical Executive Departments and various shops is available as the series of Southern diesel books are written and for serious research.

While Marvin did not have the opportunity to produce the book before his death, his name will appear as one of the books' authors. Anyone (seriously) interested is welcome to help with research and writing.

Although the attached document is undated, it was obviously written in the early to mid 1940s when diesels were starting to replace steam. The style is "all business" and may not be of interest to many list members but I post it so everyone can see the "richness" of Marvin's efforts.

Ike

PS These are large (nearly 25 MB) attachments. To reduce space on the .io list, they will be deleted in a week or two

On Apr 23, 2022, at 11:07 PM, George Courtney via groups.io <gsc3@...> wrote:

That should be SRW (Southern Railway, not SRR, of course)

George Courtney

Has anyone seen a photo, drawing or diagram of a Southern Class G-1 steam locomotive numbered 2000-2009?  These 2-8-0 types came to Southern via the acquisition of the Louisville, Evansville and St. Louis Connecting Railroad in 1900 and were built by Baldwin during 1892/93 as LE&StL Nos. 100-109.

I am trying to help a guy trying to identify an engine in a shop photograph he found. A dozen employees appearing with the locomotive.

Appreciate any help.

Jack Wyatt

2012-3 TIES, pp. 4-9, “Southern’s Little Long-Lived Flatcars"

On Apr 18, 2022, at 13:25, A&Y Dave in MD <dbott@...> wrote:

Do you have a date on the TIES article?  I paused going through them at 1998, so I have 20 years of them to go through and I keep getting distracted by neat articles on other topics.

ORER’s are not perfect but they were available to me and give an overall feel for the scope of the topic.

Thanks. The yellow fever in New Orleans and how the Southern responded was fun to research.

Dave

Sent from Dave Bott's iPhone

On Apr 18, 2022, at 11:29 AM, Bill Schafer <bill4501@...> wrote:

Dave’s excellent article on the Spanish flu appeared on p. 12 of 2019-3 TIES - six months before the Covid 19 epidemic. 

—Bill

On Apr 18, 2022, at 09:22, George Eichelberger <geichelberger@...> wrote:

Dave:

Ties ran an article on low side gons and most of the info Jim King published with his kits came from SRHA. (Jim is always very good with crediting material.)

Many people have heard my comments on ORERs before. They are far from a perfect data source!

I can’t say if other roads had the same attitude but the Southern did not always worry about the quantities in the ORERs. For example, if a series was being scrapped, there was no need to “count down” the number of cars left. When the last car was gone, the entire entry would be removed.

Those inaccuracies were for cars being purchased or rebuilt as well as scrapped. If cars were to be rebuilt/renumbered under an SCP, or purchased new, the entries would sometimes be made before the work was done or the cars delivered. The ORERs' only real use to the railroads was for dealing with interchanged cars. If car 123456 showed up in interchange, the ORER told the receiving railroad its details. If a car number was in the ORER but the car did not exist (scrapped/not delivered), it meant nothing.

There is at least one series of 40’ Southern box car rebuilds in ORERs that never existed. They were shown to have 70-ton trucks but were only rebuilt with 50-ton capy. THAT would be a serious problem in the RER because a receiving railroad could overload those cars because they relied on the published CAPY info.

The other issue I see with ORERS is how the entries aggregated cars with similar characteristics. A quantity could include cars from different orders/rebuilds as long as their AAR code and dimensions were the same (mol).

ORERS are good starting point references but I question their value for “deep” research.

Ike

PS Always confusing, the first “low side gons” by Southern classification were actually flat cars with low wooden sides. Yes, they were “gons” (116000 series?) but could be seen as flat cars with low sides.

PPS With Covid so much in the news, I really recommend Dave’s article in TIES on the Spanish Flu epidemic that was published some time ago.

On Apr 17, 2022, at 10:31 PM, A&Y Dave in MD <dbott@...> wrote:

There's been comparatively a lot of history of Southern boxcars and even hoppers in the pre-WWII era, but the gondolas, and my favorite the low side gons, have had little attention paid.  I want to fix this starting with the low side versions.

 

I'm gathering data about the Southern's early low side gondola fleet, hopefully for an article in TIES (since I haven't found an article on the history of these cars yet).  Attached (if it goes through) is a PDF with my transcription of the ORER entries for years I have (fifteen years from 1901-1945).  I included the entries for any gondola with an inside height of less than 3'10".  Many were labeled "low side" as the kind in the ORER, others just appear to have low sides by dimension.

 

The first page of the attached PDF is a pivot table indicating the total number of cars in each series by available year for series having 25+ cars in a year (leaving out the "one off" car series).  The last five pages of the PDF list each ORER year with low side gondola car number series as rows (and not filtered by the minimum count). The entire listing is helpful to see things like when AGS, CNOTP, and other subsidiaries had some cars re-lettered Southern and renumbered.

 

Now I need to review the photos I have for these series to see what I can learn.  I doubt I will find much.  I have maybe 6 photos total of the 1924 built cars (non-rebuilt). The best are from the online archive of Duke University construction in 1929.  I've gone through all the 'Southern Rails' and the first three of nine binders of SRHA TIES magazines and I have found three more photos (two of which you cannot read lettering and can barely count the ribs to confirm the type and the other one is in the Speedwitch kit instructions). I also have the only photo found of the wood side gon on flat car (117500-117999 series introduced in 1930) from the SMMW kit instructions.  I did see Ed King's article on modeling the steel low sides in O scale, but he didn't have a prototype photo or information that I didn't already see.  Kind of interesting that we have at least two model kits and one model article, but no history article!

 

If anyone has more information or photos, especially of the 9 rib 10 panel low side steel gondolas (since they are more likely), please let me know.  I've yet to go through my other books (Prince, Webb, etc) to look for glimpses of these cars.  Most photos I've seen depict the cars after rebuilding to 11 ribs starting about 1943.

 

The 1940's rebuilt with 11 ribs and later built cars are pretty well documented (even with color photos), but data on the 1924 built and earlier steel, composite, or wood cars is much harder to find.  Hopefully I can get to the archives some day and look for drawings.  I need to resolve questions like: Which of these series were all wood, which composite, and which were steel? The SMMW kit history states that the 1924 steel cars were built with 9 ribs, Andrews trucks, and AB brakes.  The latter is hard to believe, given AB brakes were introduced in 1930 and not adopted by the AAR until 1934.  So I can believe the 1937 and later built cars plus the rebuilds had AB brakes, but I wonder if that was supposed to indicate "Split K" or K brakes for 1924 built cars instead.

 

Dave Bott

 

P.S.

I extracted all the Southern Railway entry page images from at least one ORER for each year I have obtained (1901, 1903, 1904, 1905, 1907, 1908, 1909, 1912, 1913, 1917, 1926, 1930, 1934, 1935, 1945, 1950, 1955, 1959). The first ten are no longer copyrighted and I obtained via Google books. The others are ones I have bought.  Great for research purposes. If anyone is interested in a set of just the 19 Southern entries (PDFs are 45mb in ZIP file), I can make available for download from personal Google or OneDrive.  Just let me know.  I would be interested in Southern entries for years I don't have prior to 1950.

-- 

Sent from David Bott's desktop pc

<SOU-Low-Side-Gons-ORER-data-and-pivot-Bott-20220417.pdf>

On Apr 18, 2022, at 13:25, A&Y Dave in MD <dbott@...> wrote:

Do you have a date on the TIES article?  I paused going through them at 1998, so I have 20 years of them to go through and I keep getting distracted by neat articles on other topics.

ORER’s are not perfect but they were available to me and give an overall feel for the scope of the topic.

Thanks. The yellow fever in New Orleans and how the Southern responded was fun to research.

Dave

Sent from Dave Bott's iPhone

On Apr 18, 2022, at 11:29 AM, Bill Schafer <bill4501@...> wrote:

Dave’s excellent article on the Spanish flu appeared on p. 12 of 2019-3 TIES - six months before the Covid 19 epidemic. 

—Bill

On Apr 18, 2022, at 09:22, George Eichelberger <geichelberger@...> wrote:

Dave:

Ties ran an article on low side gons and most of the info Jim King published with his kits came from SRHA. (Jim is always very good with crediting material.)

Many people have heard my comments on ORERs before. They are far from a perfect data source!

I can’t say if other roads had the same attitude but the Southern did not always worry about the quantities in the ORERs. For example, if a series was being scrapped, there was no need to “count down” the number of cars left. When the last car was gone, the entire entry would be removed.

Those inaccuracies were for cars being purchased or rebuilt as well as scrapped. If cars were to be rebuilt/renumbered under an SCP, or purchased new, the entries would sometimes be made before the work was done or the cars delivered. The ORERs' only real use to the railroads was for dealing with interchanged cars. If car 123456 showed up in interchange, the ORER told the receiving railroad its details. If a car number was in the ORER but the car did not exist (scrapped/not delivered), it meant nothing.

There is at least one series of 40’ Southern box car rebuilds in ORERs that never existed. They were shown to have 70-ton trucks but were only rebuilt with 50-ton capy. THAT would be a serious problem in the RER because a receiving railroad could overload those cars because they relied on the published CAPY info.

The other issue I see with ORERS is how the entries aggregated cars with similar characteristics. A quantity could include cars from different orders/rebuilds as long as their AAR code and dimensions were the same (mol).

ORERS are good starting point references but I question their value for “deep” research.

Ike

PS Always confusing, the first “low side gons” by Southern classification were actually flat cars with low wooden sides. Yes, they were “gons” (116000 series?) but could be seen as flat cars with low sides.

PPS With Covid so much in the news, I really recommend Dave’s article in TIES on the Spanish Flu epidemic that was published some time ago.

On Apr 17, 2022, at 10:31 PM, A&Y Dave in MD <dbott@...> wrote:

There's been comparatively a lot of history of Southern boxcars and even hoppers in the pre-WWII era, but the gondolas, and my favorite the low side gons, have had little attention paid.  I want to fix this starting with the low side versions.

 

I'm gathering data about the Southern's early low side gondola fleet, hopefully for an article in TIES (since I haven't found an article on the history of these cars yet).  Attached (if it goes through) is a PDF with my transcription of the ORER entries for years I have (fifteen years from 1901-1945).  I included the entries for any gondola with an inside height of less than 3'10".  Many were labeled "low side" as the kind in the ORER, others just appear to have low sides by dimension.

 

The first page of the attached PDF is a pivot table indicating the total number of cars in each series by available year for series having 25+ cars in a year (leaving out the "one off" car series).  The last five pages of the PDF list each ORER year with low side gondola car number series as rows (and not filtered by the minimum count). The entire listing is helpful to see things like when AGS, CNOTP, and other subsidiaries had some cars re-lettered Southern and renumbered.

 

Now I need to review the photos I have for these series to see what I can learn.  I doubt I will find much.  I have maybe 6 photos total of the 1924 built cars (non-rebuilt). The best are from the online archive of Duke University construction in 1929.  I've gone through all the 'Southern Rails' and the first three of nine binders of SRHA TIES magazines and I have found three more photos (two of which you cannot read lettering and can barely count the ribs to confirm the type and the other one is in the Speedwitch kit instructions). I also have the only photo found of the wood side gon on flat car (117500-117999 series introduced in 1930) from the SMMW kit instructions.  I did see Ed King's article on modeling the steel low sides in O scale, but he didn't have a prototype photo or information that I didn't already see.  Kind of interesting that we have at least two model kits and one model article, but no history article!

 

If anyone has more information or photos, especially of the 9 rib 10 panel low side steel gondolas (since they are more likely), please let me know.  I've yet to go through my other books (Prince, Webb, etc) to look for glimpses of these cars.  Most photos I've seen depict the cars after rebuilding to 11 ribs starting about 1943.

 

The 1940's rebuilt with 11 ribs and later built cars are pretty well documented (even with color photos), but data on the 1924 built and earlier steel, composite, or wood cars is much harder to find.  Hopefully I can get to the archives some day and look for drawings.  I need to resolve questions like: Which of these series were all wood, which composite, and which were steel? The SMMW kit history states that the 1924 steel cars were built with 9 ribs, Andrews trucks, and AB brakes.  The latter is hard to believe, given AB brakes were introduced in 1930 and not adopted by the AAR until 1934.  So I can believe the 1937 and later built cars plus the rebuilds had AB brakes, but I wonder if that was supposed to indicate "Split K" or K brakes for 1924 built cars instead.

 

Dave Bott

 

P.S.

I extracted all the Southern Railway entry page images from at least one ORER for each year I have obtained (1901, 1903, 1904, 1905, 1907, 1908, 1909, 1912, 1913, 1917, 1926, 1930, 1934, 1935, 1945, 1950, 1955, 1959). The first ten are no longer copyrighted and I obtained via Google books. The others are ones I have bought.  Great for research purposes. If anyone is interested in a set of just the 19 Southern entries (PDFs are 45mb in ZIP file), I can make available for download from personal Google or OneDrive.  Just let me know.  I would be interested in Southern entries for years I don't have prior to 1950.

-- 

Sent from David Bott's desktop pc

<SOU-Low-Side-Gons-ORER-data-and-pivot-Bott-20220417.pdf>