40’ DOUBLE-DOOR BOXCARS
The majority of early boxcars were equipped with six foot wide side doors which were insufficient for larger loads such as lumber, furniture and automobiles. The earliest double-door cars were “door and a half” cars with a four-foot auxiliary door to the left of the main six-foot door providing staggered ten-foot openings. This soon gave way to true double-door cars with staggered twelve-foot openings. Some cars built for automobile service had end doors on one end. End doors on only one end limited their usefulness, but putting doors on both ends would jeopardize the structural integrity of the car body.
Cars equipped for hauling automobiles carried mechanical designations of XAR, XMR or XR, indicating a car equipped with doors at least ten feet wide and equipped with permanent automobile stowing equipment. They could be with or without end doors. As they were often marked “Automobile”, these cars are listed separately in the charts below
PENNSYLVANIA X31 ROUND ROOF BOXCARS
FINE N-SCALE
The standard inside height for boxcars was nine feet, four inches in the early thirties. The Pennsylvania Railroad felt a need for higher capacity boxcars, particularly for automobile service. They developed the X31 boxcar with an interior height of ten feet and rounded edges at the roof to reduce clearance problems. These cars were constructed as both double-door cars (X31) and single-door cars (X31a), and were used by other railroads under Pennsy control.
Though no ready-to-run models are available in N-scale, cast resin kits of both versions are available from Fine N-scale. The chart below lists the roads that originally owned X31 boxcars, as well as the short lines that picked them up second hand in later years. Cars equipped to handle automobiles are listed separately; incredibly, Penn Central listed a single Pennsy X31 type XR automobile car in the October, 1975 Equipment Register.
MILWAUKEE ROAD RIBBED DOUBLE DOOR BOXCARS
FOX VALLEY MODELS
In addition to a large fleet of single door ribbed boxcars, the Milwaukee Road constructed a total of 1,100 40’ ribbed double-door boxcars. Six-hundred cars had 12’6” doors while the remaining 500 had 15’ doors.
Fox Valley Models offers an N scale model of a car with 12’6” doors. Like the single-door version, the model features truck mounted Micro-Trains couplers and non-operating doors. The model replicates an interesting feature of the prototype; a removable center post that separates the two doors. Fox Valley 9011-1 is decorated in the as-delivered scheme with the full company name inside the rectangular logo. Although it’s marked as an automobile car, the October, 1947 Equipment Register lists the entire series of 12’6” door cars as type XM cars for general service. However, the entire series of 15’ double door cars were listed as type XAR automobile cars.
