Freight Car Friday: PROX 17386 at Aldershot, ON 5-08-2015

PROX 17386 is seen at Aldershot, ON on 5-08-2015, a day after being released from the Procor Oakville shop, where the car had interior coating and new paint applied. The car was built by UTLX Manufacturing in Sheldon, TX in April 2015, and features the new end platform design. 

Freight Car Friday tonight features PROX 17386, a brand new 13,800 gal sulfuric acid tank car built for Procor Limited by UTLX Manufacturing at Sheldon, TX. The car is part of an order that is being built in Texas and shipped to the Procor shop at Oakville, ON for painting and interior coating; part of this order is being painted and coated at the Union Tank Car shop at Altoona, PA. While the overall sulfuric acid tank car arrangement hasn’t changed in many years, this car exemplifies some recent changes that were made to tank car design. The first and perhaps most obvious is the addition of a pressure-car style fittings protection assembly on the top of the car. All fittings are now enclosed within the housing rather than on separate nozzles. Secondly, all cars built after January 1, 2015 are required to have the new style end platform safety appliance design. Whereas previous cars only had a crossover handrail along the transverse running board, the new design mandates an extra grab iron so that railroad personnel can have three-point attachment when riding the car. Additionally, new lower steps are mandated that do not exceed a height of 17” above the rails. The new safety appliance design consumed additional space at the ends of the car, requiring the air brake reservoir to be placed underneath the car (as had been done on cars built in the 1960’s). A further change is that cars on this order are painted white, at customer request, which is something that had all but disappeared from the Procor acid car fleet as previously-white cars had been painted black at time of coating replacement.

‘Til next time,

Cheers,

Peter.