Here is a link to Harrisburg Car Manufacturing Co. showing a selection of their rolling stock from the pioneering era. There are 45 images that you can move through forward and backwards.
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www.library.upenn.edu]
These are relatively short cars with link and pin couplers and hand brakes on one truck only. There are a few different truck designs. I find these cars to be quite attractive with their simple, robust, well-designed appearance, and evocative road names lettered out in arcs with periods after them.
The Harrisburg Car Co. started in 1853, but the link does not identify the time period of the cars shown. I would guess that they date from the 1855-1870 period.
Note photo #21 showing what one might assume to be a stock car owned by Central Transporting Co. The sign on the door identifies it as a “SIXTY BARREL OIL CAR.”
These cars all have truss rods, but apparently, their short length only requires a minimal degree of truss rod support, since the rods are set relative close to the center sill of the car. Notice that most of the truss rods on these cars have no turnbuckles or even a separating clevis at the midpoint. They may be continuous rods that are tightened by the end nuts. However, that raises the question of how they would be replaced if one happened to break in service.
With the type of rods connected with a clevis joint, you could pull the clevis pin, drop the end of one rod, and pull it out of the end sill toward the center of the car. The cars shown here appear to be in the very beginning of the truss rod era when the details were still somewhat experimental.
Some of the rods in the cars shown do appear to have either a clevis connection at the midpoint, or a short connector link. I guess that with a connector link, the advantage would be that all the rods could be identically made rather than having the male/female elements of the clevis, thus requiring two different rod configurations.
