Cars away from home

I was watching trains before work today in Baltimore and I saw two Pan Am cars.

Now I see Pan AM box cars often, usually one per train though, but today I saw a hopper car with "Sullivan's Scrap Holyoke MA" painted on the side.

I guess his business is doing well to be shipping down to Baltimore.

Did you happen to catch the road number? Its possible the far was sold to a leasing company. There are a lot of cars like that floating around. The leasing companies buy them and then just spray paint a new road number over the old one.

Sadly it went by to fast.

In the train it was only separated from the Pan Am Boxcar by 1 car so I thought maybe they were from the same PAR/PAS train.

There was a post on the Guilford Rail Sighting Yahoo group of a link to a you tube video ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZJdWy_M ... re=related ) that one, that shows the cars, 1:18 in. They are separate from any PAR boxes, but are in with other gons, suggesting it might be a move to a scrap dealer down in that area.

Even with the video quality being not perfect, it is possible to see the marks, EAMX 4XX's (I think 2 of the 4 were 447 and 442) which fall right into Sullivan's car range. No signs of a patch, hopefully business is just that good.

I've seen Sullivan cars out in upstate New York. For the most part railroad cars are rarely captive. Scrap metal from Sullivans has to be sent somewhere.
http://i222.photobucket.com/albums/dd26 ... G_3198.jpg

A friend recently sent me a cameraphone pic of a Sullivan in downtown DC...

That's really the point of running a railroad, send the cars away from home : ) The Pan Am boxcars are mostly newsprint destined for the midwest or south, so you will see them everywhere. Someone has to get Sullivan's cars too, so they can go anywhere.

A small but commercially-important point mentioned a couple of times in recent days here in the Pan Am forum, so please forgive the nitpicking. The outbound paper traffic generated in Maine on Pan Am is printing paper for magazines and direct-mail publications. Newsprint is used in newspaper publication with much of the area production, I believe, located in Quebec. Think Playboy vs. The Wall Street Journal or that LL Bean catalog vs. your local hometown newspaper.

I guess being a customer on the Conn River line, I didn't expect him to be able to have such a wide reach. It's good though, that line needs solid customers to fuel growth.

The outbound paper traffic generated in Maine on Pan Am is printing paper for magazines and direct-mail publications.

And thus the inbound clay slurry traffic - the clay is used to make that glossy finish on the magazine paper.