Re: Sumpter Valley Railway 250 & 251

It would be interesting to try to figure out what they typically had behind them on the SVRy.

Taking this photo as an example there appear to me to be 11 loads of lumber and caboose 5. I have a large collection of weight reports from 1921-22, but nothing from the late era. Per a thread I posted in once before, the cars in my 1921-22 reports were typically overloaded. Most of the flat cars were rated at 40,000lbs with a light weight of 17-18,000. On this basis a loaded car just within it's rating should be 55,000. However in the 1922 records I took a casual review of gross weight per car was around 70,000 with some going just over 74,000 and a few around 67,000. Caboose 5 weighs 21,000. So on the high side 11 loads at 70,000 plus the caboose is 791,000 or 395.5 tons. On the low side 11 loads at 55,000 plus the caboose is 626,000 or 313 tons. The ruling grade east bound around the area the train is traveling in this photo is 3.35%. I was just looking at the tonnage charts that Jack Neville sent me which of course shows the 250tons in the area Tom mentions, but not knowing the lines I can't make a comparison to a district shown on the chart where the grade would also be 3.3%, so Tom if you have profile available it would be neat to make that comparison to see if they were getting about the same performance.