A friend recently sent us an interesting picture, dated 1949. The main subject of the photo was obviously meant to be the New York Central streamliner leaving Chicago, but off to the right you can see a gondola with a Van Dorn target end. This seems much later than we might have thought for these ends to be in service. Who knew? But Van Dorn is one of our favorite subjects, so here you go.
Correction! Dennis Storzek points out that this is actually a Haskell & Barker design, not Van Dorn, since the ribs form a spiral and not concentric ovals. This is an interesting example of a company making a trivial change to somebody else's design in order to avoid proprietary or patented intellectual property, something that has happened quite often.
2 comments:
That's not a Van Dorn end. The ribs on the Van Dorn ends were concentric figures, these form a spiral. I believe these were a Haskell & Barker proprietary end, and the Pullman Library has drawings. Indeed, more drawings than usual for a vendor supplied part, which is why I suspect it is a H&B design. There were only three groups of cars built with these ends that I saw when I was doing a project sorting and filing H&B drawings; one group each of gondolas for the Monon, Soo Line, and Clarkson Coal Mining Co., the later which went to the Soo second hand, all built in the early twenties about the time that Pullman bought H&B.
Dave Cook.
I think this photo is relatively rare as an F3A-B-A is powering this train. In checking an NYC Diesel roster, the NYC only had 2 sets of passenger F units.
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