Gondola in vary bad shape & still active.

Anyone ever see a Gondola in this bad of shape and still in service?? This is at one of the Steel mills owned by United States Steel. It looks to be like its still being used in interplant switching.
http://www.rr-fallenflags.org/uss/weco511jja.jpg

Occasionally a gon will have a sidewall failure. It's more common than you might imagine. I don't see how the picture implies it's still in service though. Once this failure occurs it would most likely be scrapped, once they can safely unload it. With all the other cars coming and going, a load of scrap isn't a big deal once it's inside the plant. With the chance of it hitting an adjacent track, or collapsing completely, there's no sane person that would continue operating this car any type of service.

In the early days of my railroad service, we learned straight away to check the floor of any foreign gons bringing track material to our shops lest there be holes in the floor large for a man to FALL thru! In the winter, the cars would come in often filled with snow, and we had to scoop/shovel the snow out of the gons before unloading. We were quiet prideful, as was my company (Southern) about the condition of our own cars. But the material came in from off-line vendors, so we had no control over which road's gons were loaded in. Thus the caution in allowing laborers to stomp around in a foreign company's gons before checking them out. Ironically, 30 years later, Norfolk Southern now owns 1/2 of that other road! OOPS! I just gave away the name of the company whose gons were full of holes!

Gadfly