RLK knew a LOT about this flat car, and shared this info!

I’m going to hazard a guess here and suggest the image of the loaded CNW flatcar was taken at the West Allis, Wisconsin Allis-Chalmers works.

The plant was serviced by two railroads, the Chicago and Northwestern and the Milwaukee Road.

Having been employed by both I’ve given a bit of thought to the image and cannot think of any other facility in Milwaukee that required a car with the capacity to handle 400,000 pounds.

Thus, my keen sense of deduction leads me to believe the load is out of A-C. 

In days long past railroads used to paint a ‘Load Limit’ and ‘Capacity’ on each car. The definition of each was pretty much the same, so at some point recently (relatively) they dropped the capacity reference. In short, both represented the weight axle journals could bear.

 In this picture we see four trucks which would effectively double the capacity of a standard flatcar. Also note the ‘dispo’ instructions painted on the car: as soon as this damn thing is empty don’t even think about loading it again and return it promptly to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. 

There are two ‘built dates’ painted on this critter, December 1930 and July 1943, the 43 date obviously referring to a rebuild. By 1943 everything coming out of A-C was made for the war effort, so we can be reasonably sure this equipment was made to handle such loads. This is not to say with certainty this load was part of that effort as security issues would have precluded pictures of wartime materials. 

My father worked at the Hawley Plant during the war, a building hurriedly constructed for the specific purpose of producing stuff for the Manhattan Project. Dad received a draft deferment because of the nature of his work. He left us in 2005 at 90 plus and he kept a tight lip about his work there to his last breath. 

He had a bunch of other great stories though, one in particular I’ll always remember. They were in the middle of a project that could only be shipped by rail, but traffic could not find a carrier with suitable equipment. The ‘supe’ finally got pissed off and said, “We’ll build our own damn car.” And they did. Such was the mindset at A-C. I used to drive dad through what was left of A-C, repurposed buildings that sell women’s panties and bras, sub sandwiches and the like. It tore him up, recalling days when A-C WD tractors came out the south end of tractor plant two, a steady stream of orange 24/7, and transformers and dam turbines sat on railcars waiting to go, lined up like automobiles in a parking lot. Women’s panties, but no tractors for every corner of the planet. Good grief! RIP Pop.

Thanks RLK!

This photo id from the post a month ago of the cyclotron https://justacarguy.blogspot.com/2021/02/neither-my-contemporaries-nor-my.html