Airslide Hopper Cars

[ENR3005]

One often overlooked freight car in our sim is the Airslide hopper car which has mostly disappeared mostly from the railroad scene and if still in service is mostly used as a buffer car for unit trains of crude oil. An interesting often overlooked fact is that these cars were not exclusively manufactured in the 60s to early 80s, production actually continued up into the mid 90s with slightly larger variations of the same car. Many of these later production cars were purchased by companies like ADM and appear to still be use today at certain industries such as the Nestle Plant in Little Chute Wisconsin where a large cut can be viewed on Google Earth. 44.284927°-88.323881° on Google Earth for those who want to see for themselves. Even out here on the West Coast in British Columbia I have seen the odd car coming across the border on BNSF in recent years. I am curious to know what of the newer fleet of these cars remain in service (other than buffer car service) and who current owners are which seems to be a bit elusive after researching. These are indeed becoming a rarity to find. Also what commodities are still carried? It seems sugar and corn starch may be the ones for Nestle. Corn Starch is also heavily used in paper manufacturing and I suspect is the commodity carried in the odd West Coast cars I have seen. The Golden Age of Railroading site has a nice model which I have been able to manipulate the size of with TSTools to appear as one of the bigger variations for a potential repaint. We don't have any pressure differential models available in our sim at this point which is why this car holds my interest as I have a paper mill on my route project that is in need of cars that can carry corn starch which this car does. I will likely do an ADM repaint however I suspect there are still other owners of these cars and would like some variation if possible. Any info would be appreciated. Repaints will be added to the file library for all at some point. Thanks

[BNSFdude]

I've wanted to do new airslides (as well as Trinity PowerFlos) from scratch for a really long time. It's just the time factor.