The Van Dorn Girder Plate Company, Inc.

The W.T. Van Dorn Company was best known for its couplers, which saw wide use in the traction industry around the turn of the century. It was also known - if someone infamously - for its "Target" steel boxcar ends, described here. However an affiliated company, formed by William Van Dorn and apparently sited on South Paulina Street alongside the W.T. Van Dorn Company, was the Van Dorn Girder Plate Company.

Among the materials recently donated to IRM by Larry Logan was a manila folder with advertising materials and some biographical information on W.T. Van Dorn himself (watch for that in a later post). The advertising materials, which are shown below, include advertisements both for boxcar ends (of the "double target" variety that came later in the 1910s and was marginally more successful than the original "Target" end) and for movable flooring for refrigerated cars. It's obvious that Van Dorn was looking for products that might expand its presence in the railroad freight car construction industry.

The collection includes several two-sided advertisements on heavy card, larger than an index card, with an illustration and brief description on one side and "selling copy" on the reverse. This card advertises Van Dorn Universal Auxiliary Flooring, basically a movable floor that you can drop into a refrigerated car. Reefers normally have slatted floors to permit air circulation but this allows you to raise the slatted floor up to the ceiling so that you can clean underneath it or use the car as a normal solid-floor boxcar. This version has all-steel framing.

If you're a cheapskate, Van Dorn will also be pleased to sell you the all-wood version, supported by 2"x4" scantlings dressed on all sides.

This fellow is showing how the floor can be raised or lowered, not to mention stopped at any intermediate point. This can be done one-handed, so don't pay any attention to the fact that the guy in the picture is using both his hands. He's just grandstanding.

If you're not sold on ratcheting your floor up and down, you can instead choose to just lift it. At least I guess that's how this works; Van Dorn Sectional Flooring is offered in short sections that are lifted (by muscle, I suppose) into the ceiling of the car as soon as the car is unloaded, allowing the subfloor to be cleaned and allowing access by wheeled carts. This product is noted as being in use on the I.C.

The advertising cards mention a demonstration installation that can be seen and examined at the Van Dorn plant. Sure enough, there's a photo of this "showroom model." And there are several photos of what appears to be a portable, suitcase-sized demonstration model of the wooden flooring:

This model would be kind of interesting if it had survived, but chances are pretty good that it didn't. Can you imagine something like this showing up in a random antique store and the proprietor trying to guess what in the world it is?

It's not clear how many railroads actually installed any of this Van Dorn flooring, but the Illinois Central at least tried it out. This photo shows the interior of IC 40' long reefer #53606 with its Van Dorn flooring down at floor level and ready for use.

And here's the companion photo showing the flooring stowed up in the ceiling so that the car's sub-floor can be cleaned. And maybe the idea was also that the car could now be used for general freight, I'm not sure.

This nicely done drawing shows exactly how the flooring was used, showing it both sitting flat on the floor and also in its stowed position in the ceiling. You can see how much space in the average ice-cooled refrigerator car was taken up by the ice bunkers at the ends.

There are also several advertising cards showing the "double target" end, or as it was called by the company, the Two-Piece Sectional Corrugated Steel End. "Target End" has a nicer ring to it but they didn't have much luck selling those.

This card describes the two-piece end, describes the concentric portion as an "anchor truss," and notes that the steel used is 3/16" thick plate.

This is kind of interesting. A batch of boxcars with underframes and steel ends installed, but no sides or roofs, is shown in the picture looking rather like bulkhead flat cars ahead of their time. The original Van Dorn "Target End" seemed like it was designed primarily to be retrofitted to older wooden cars, but this advertisement seems geared much more towards generating orders for new construction.

Here's an interior view, with the description pointing out that the steel car end will help stiffen and support the wooden corner posts of the body. The cars in these images were built in 1914 and it would be a few decades before all-steel boxcar construction became common. At this time, most boxcars were almost entirely wood from the floor up and single-sheathed construction with steel framing members was state-of-the-art.

And voila, the final product. This was a series of 500 cars built for the Central of Georgia and was, to my knowledge, the only large order of boxcars ever fitted with Van Dorn ends.

Finally, a peek behind the scenes at the Marketing Department. Here we see a draft for a Van Dorn advertisement including Target Ends, Two-Piece Corrugated Ends, Sectional Flooring, and Universal Auxiliary Flooring - all of the Van Dorn Girder Plate Company's greatest hits circa 1915 or so. The fun thing is that it's got corrections scribbled on it - "ventilation" and "transportation" are misspelled, the word "materially" should be dropped, a few other notations, possibly from a Mr. Cornell.

The business offices of the Van Dorn Girder Plate Company, at least at one point, were at 608 South Dearborn in Chicago. There's a large 1920s-looking office building there now but I'm not sure whether it's the same building that the Van Dorn salesmen would have recognized. Penmanship really is a dying art.

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