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22. Remember coal trains require a double-rotary car
– and the stripes need to all be oriented the same way
throughout the train – or this will happen! Oops ...
22
one or two solid 100-car sets of these newer cars to haul coal.
One unfortunate drawback was that heating the coal loads
damaged the interior liners, forcing the lining to be re-applied
on some cars.
For quite some time, the 4000 cu. ft. SULX cars have been
mixed with the SULX bathtub cars, with the only requirement
being that the rotary couplers get all oriented the same way.
Once CN acquired enough aluminum coal hoppers, they made
many of the steel coal fleet available for other lading.
In the early 2000s, up until the stock market crash in 2008, CN
filled out the sulphur fleet with these excess steel coal cars. It
CN Coal and Sulphur Operations - 12
was quite common to find CN 196- (black and brown) and 199-
(brown) series cars of various heritage in sulphur service. Not
many, if any, of these cars received a liner.
Currently, only former UNPX 102-series bathtub gons, now let-
tered OFOX with the same car number, are being used along
with the SULX cars. Sultran acquired a number of ex-CP bath-
tub gons and numbered them in the SULX 3000-series.
As the coal business increased, more orders were placed with
more than one manufacturer for the 4000 cu. ft. coal gon-
dola. As a result there are now many different versions of the
same car. As this began to happen, it became more difficult
to maintain pure sets of equipment. The lease arrangements
also changed and cars had their reporting marks and numbers
changed to reflect that.
Other than Sultran equipment, the cars that ran as complete
sets for the longest period of time ended up being the CNHX
cars built for Ontario Hydro service. The balance of the cars got
lumped together in a pool, making it possible to find any style
and number series in any set of equipment.
This last fact allows the modeler to purchase a wide variety of
the models to easily build a train longer than 12 cars for either
coal or sulphur service, or run shorter cuts of cars to move other
commodities such as coke, ties, or sulphur from smaller plants.
Make sure you check out these cars. They are some fine mod-
els, and their usage history can make for some fascinating
model railroad operations.
MRH-Apr 2013
