As a follow up to my earlier posting on the additional wood pieces between the sills that were added to the fleet of drop bottom gons, I can add the following:
As reported earlier, all but one of the four cars at the Colorado RR Museum had additional wood pieces added between the sills.
While in Chama Wednesday, I checked all 14 DB Gons, and found that all were fitted with the same wood fillers, as did the one at Antonito. Erick Nelson checked 21 DBs along Narrow Gauge avenue in Durango and found all of those cars also fitted with wood spacers.
So, after checking 41 of the surviving Drop Bottom Gons, all but one had been fitted with spacers between the long sills in the middle of the cars. The spacers all run 12' between the inside (closest to the center of the car) hinges of the #2 and #5 of the six drop doors on each side.
The purpose of these fillers was to support the long sills from the weight of the drop doors as the doors would open. The four wood stops, which also support the truss rods, are bolted to the bottom of the long sills, and it is these that drop doors #2,3,4, and 5 hit at the bottom of their drop. With the fillers wedged between the sills, vibration and flexing of the wood members would be greatly reduced. The end doors, #1 and 6, are stopped by steel trucks below, which is why the wood fillers are not extended longer. The chains attached to the doors are not for any function other than raising the empty drop doors and holding them closed. When released, the full weight of the doors and the load above them would have crashed heavily onto the wood stops. Over time, these violent crashes must have caused things to loosen and wobble. So extra wood bracing was added to support the sills and also provide modelers with a very cool way to add prototypical weight to empty cars.
The most typical version of this arrangement are two 3 1/2" X 8" X 12' wood beams laid between the sills on the 3 1/2" side, with 1" spacers wedged between them in the middle and at the ends. In some cases, there is a 4 X 8 X 12 and a 3 1/2 X 8 X 12 with single spacers, and sometimes there are two sets of spacers with two 3 1/2 X 8 X 12's. In one case, there was a 12' tie wedged between the sills. Clearly, each car was individually fit at some time after having been in service on the D&RGW.
I wanted to share this info if anyone is interested. I have notes of the specific arrangements of all the cars I checked in Chama and Antonito.
Mike
