Re: St.Elmo Box Cars

This isn't very up to date but in the fall of 2003, I spent a Saturday with the cars and the Litchfield car was flattened mostly and rotting badly. The Kansas Central car had been blocked up and was in reasonable condition due to the inner metal roof. I measured and sketched everything that I could on the 27' KC car that afternoon and took several photos. The photos didn't turn out very good because of the weather and relatively dark afternoon. It rained and sleeted on me. Several years ago I started doing a CAD drawing of the boxcar, but I never completed all of it. The car was built with tension rods in the floor frame, but never had normal truss rods and that feature shows up in the few decent photos of these cars. The side framework of the car was a large queen post truss and the body bolsters had been steel plates.
Dave