NYC hoppers with a red rib?

I saw this on ebay (cropped) and did a bit of Googling and came up short on what the red rib was for. Any idea? Thanks.

Charles

Might be a replacement rib in primer paint. The car shop may have fixed it and didn't repaint it.

True. I know other roads painted a rib. I've seen many EL hoppers with a yellow rib. So was going with a special meaning. But it could be primer.

IIRC, this denotes either a mechanical modification or an assigned service.

A possible mechanical modification might have been that the coupler could rotate 360 degrees so the car wouldn't have to be uncoupled at a dumper; I think the PRR put a yellow panel at the car end to indicate that. Only one coupler per car would have to be modified, as long as they kept all the cars facing in the same direction.

I guess we can rule that out in this case, since the red rib is the center one of 9.

I looked at the photo too fast and thought I was only seeing about half of the car--is it an ore jenny?

Appears to be a standard 2-pocket hopper, altho the pic does not show it too clearly. ORER shows NYC 828787 would have been a 65-ton hopper, overall length 31 feet 6 inches. It shows over 3500 cars in the series so it must have been a fairly standard design.