The post-Civil War Chesapeake & Ohio Railway Company started as a general freight hauling enterprise and grew into a bulk coal-hauling business. The last references to building four- wheel open-top cars for the purpose of bulk hauling of coal and other mine products appeared in 1870-1871. The C&O also purchased 100 eight-wheel "coal cars" that year. With the completion of "the road" to Huntington, West Virginia, and their independence from C.P. Huntington's Newport News and Mississippi Valley holding corporation, the records of the C&O's Mechanical Department's freight car purchases records became more numerous and are more available for historical scrutiny. Purchase records, freight car diagrams, lettering drawings, and general arrangement drawings before the late-1 929 Van Sweringen holding company Advisory Mechanical Committee (AMC) era are incomplete. The AMC jointly supervised the C&O, PM, NKP, and Erie railroad's mechanical departments from a central office in Cleveland, Ohio, and Cleveland remained the C&O's main offices until the Chessie System was formed.

The typical coal car of the 1880s and 1890s was a wooden open-top car with hopper bottoms. By increasing the archbar truck journal sizes and raising their body heights, their capacities readily grew from 25 to 421/2 tons. Sometime in this era, sloped floor planking was added between the hoppers and the ends to make these cars fully "self-clearing," and steel center sills were incorporated. During the end of the nineteenth century they made the transition to Westinghouse air brakes and standard Janney couplers, and eventually, during the first decade of the twentieth century, to all-steel, 55-ton hopper-bottom gondola cars. Hopper car construction was driven by the available locomotive "drawbar power" increases, journal size increases, and experiments between the more robust outside-ribbed and the more capacity-efficient offset-side constructions. Because bituminous coal was slightly heavier than northern anthracite coal, the C&O's capacity ratings became very conservative. Standard cars of the times might have been listed as 55-ton designs, but after the AMC was formed, they became 50-ton designs for the C&O Lines. Eventually the standard 50 and 70-ton cars of the 1920s and 1930s would evolve into 60, 80, and 100-ton cars of the 1960s and 1970s.

The C&O also had a need for hopper cars, with and without wooden side racks, dedicated to coke service. They tended to use older wooden or resheathed-superstructure box cars, less roof panels, with light steel plates on the floors, for coke movements. Similarly, hopper cars were also dedicated to wood chip service for transporting wood chips to paper mills.

The C&O's general-purpose open-top car was the flat-bottom gondola. In the late 1800s these cars were basically truss-rod and later steel sill platform cars with stake pockets on their side sills with stakes, ends, and sides. They might have been equipped with drop-bottom doors. With the advent of composite wood-steel side construction, they began to take structural advantage of the side truss construction. Since their sides typically took more abuse than dedicated hopper cars, they stayed with the more readily replaceable wooden sides longer than hopper cars did. High-sided gondola cars started to appear around 191 0. Most C&O gondola cars could also be used as peak- season backup coal cars. A forerunner to the modern rotary-dump gondola car was introduced in 1921. These were the six-axle, 100- ton "battleship" gondolas that were explicitly designed for shipping coal to the rotary dumpers at the C&O's ocean shipping docks in Newport News, Virginia. Gondola cars became more specialized during World War 11, and grew in capacity and length up through the Chessie System formation.

Flat car development paralleled that of gondola cars, but they did not have sides or ends to add strength. Specialized flat cars' capacities made it up to 125 tons and 85 feet in length. Hopper, gondola, and flat cars were painted in black livery. Lettering and markings were white, except for a brief period in the 1950s when yellow markings were tried.

The typical C&O closed-top "house car', or box car, grew from an all wooden, truss-rod construction, to a steel center sill with wood construction, to a steel underframe with wooden superstructure between the 1880s and World War 1. Their capacities went from 25 and 30 to 40 tons. Their sizes were strongly driven by Master Car Builders Association designs. Freight car brown was the normal livery for house cars, except between 1893 and 1898 when C&O Air Brake Freight Orange was used on regular and ventilated box cars equipped for interchange service with proper safety appliances act compliant air brakes and Janney couplers. Once these safety appliances became standard, the standard livery returned to brown. Prior to World War 11, inside lengths of ARA or AAR standard box cars worked their way up from 36 to 40 and 50 feet, and their inside heights from 8 feet to 1 0 feet. After the merger with the Pere Marquette in 1947, specialized automobile parts cars added underframe cushioning devices, internal load restraining devices, and grew to 60 and 86 feet in length and sometimes tall enough to be classified as hi-cube cars.

The C&O also had a large fleet of stock cars. Their last design utilized steel underframes, ends, and roofs and carried over wooden slats. These disappeared with the advent of regional meat packers and the growth of the Interstate highway system.

The C&O developed an extensive fleet of covered hopper cars for an ever-growing dry-bulk material service. These cars started out between the World Wars as converted conventional hopper cars that had roof and roof-hatch assemblies added. Eventually, the C&O purchased specially-built 50-ton covered hopper cars with specialized hopper chutes and doors. These cars quickly grew to 70-ton and then 1 00-ton capacities. Specialized internal mechanisms, such as Airslides, were used to expedite unloading, and special internal coatings were added for ease of cleanup.

The C&O still had four-wheel "bobber" cabooses being built up to 1901. Thereafter, eight- wheel cabooses, with air brakes and MCS couplers, were standard. C&O, Hocking Valley, and Pere Marquette preferences in their designs can be seen. Extended vision designs didn't start until 1965.

The 91,627 freight cars owned by the C&O as listed in the 1948 C&O Annual Report were split as follows: hopper bottom gondola cars, 62.1 %; box cars, 25.1 %; flat bottom gondola cars, 9.9%; cabooses, 0.93%; flat cars, 0.9%; covered hopper cars, 0.68%; stock cars, 0.37%; and tank cars, 0.009%.

References on C&O freight cars available in print through the C&OHS are Freight Cars of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway August 1, 1937, by Carl W. Shaver; Chesapeake and Ohio Freight Cars, 1937-1965, Volume 1: Hopper and Gondola Cars, by Alfred L. Kresse, Jr. and Chesapeake and Ohio Color Guide to Freight and Passenger Equipment, by David H. Hickcox.

One will have to keep an eye open for CSX maintenance-of-way trains and abandoned sidings for live examples of the few remaining C&O freight cars. The alternative is the Chesapeake & Ohio Historical Society's photograph collection at our archives.