Re: Westside Lumber Trucks

West Side Lumber started operations with Carter Brothers disconnected log trucks, and 24’ 15 ton capacity Carter flat cars. They quickly added similar flat cars built by John Hammond in San Francisco, and got rid of the disconnects. The Carter and Hammond flats both used similar swing motion wood transom trucks.
A few used SPC cars snuck in, including at least one 30’ Sacramento built car.

By the 1920’s the company had developed their own flatcar design running on trucks of their design… sometimes called Crawford cars, they were 24’ long, all sills the same height, with trucks which were now rigid motion, but used many Carter and Hammond Parts Many of these flats were still on hand at the end of operations.

Before WWII they purchased 99 connected log cars from Swayne Lumber Company (modelers call these skeleton cars, but that term is better used for a flat car without a deck.) WSLC then built 40 or so copies of the Swayne cars, using parts purchased on the used equipment market, including trucks from Florence & Cripple Creek, presumably via NCO.

When looking at WSLC equipment, realize all of it was by the end a product of lots of repairs and rebuilding, and there was no standard…

Randy Hees

Director, Nevada State Railroad Museum, Boulder City, retired
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