ACL/SAL Reweigh Station Abreviations

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Gents,

I've been trying to come up with a list of the abbreviations used to designate shop/yard locations on the ACL and SAL. The abbreviations were stenciled on the side sill of rolling stock along with the date the car was reweighed or had its journals repacked. I've listed below what I've found to date but was hoping others could add to the list. Thanks for any input.

---ACL---
Florence - FLO
Charleston - CHN
Waycross - WX
Wilmington - WIL
Tampa - TPA
Montgomery - MTG
Jacksonville - JAX
Lakeland - LAKD
Sanford - SAN
Emerson(R.M.)- ERM
??????? - SRM

---AB&C--- (also ACL after 1946)
Birmingham - BHAM
Fitzgerald - FITZ

---C&WC---
Augusta - AUG

---CN&L---
Columbia - COL (also ACL???)

---SAL---
Jacksonville - JAX

-- Buddy Hill (palmettoLTD@hotmail.com), June 04, 2004

Answers

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-- Buck Dean (abdean@comcast.net), June 04, 2004.


Good lists. A few more that come to mind:

ACL - Manchester, MC or MAN. Also, in the early 1900s Waycross was sometimes abbreviated WAYX.

SAL - Howells (Atlanta), HWL - Wildwood, WW - Raleigh, RAL I think - Birmingham, BHM

Regarding Rocky Mount, it seems that most of the time freight cars were SRM (South Rocky Mount) and passenger cars were EMR (Emerson shops).

These symbols were also used on freight cars to show full repainting dates - in the upper left corner (1950s-on) or on the underframe (1940s and older). On the ACL, head-end passenger cars had the repaint date and shop symbol stenciled above a door on the inside. Some older paint jobs had the symbols and dates on the ends too.

-- Larry Goolsby (lgoolsby@aphsa.org), June 04, 2004.


Buddy - Here is some additional information on your reweigh date posting. Back in October 1995, Richard Hendrickson, well known West Coast freightcar modeler, and the "Freight Car Mafia" issued a listing of reweign initials for the entire country. Because they were West Coast, the Southeastern RRs weren't very well represented in the list. My subsequent researchs filled that in.

For the benefit of the uninitiated, a freightcar reweigh date appears on the side sill above the left truck. Above the right truck is the BLT(built) date, when the car was built. Until the first reweigh, which by law, is every five years for the life of the car, the reweigh symbol is NEW. If you are a model railroader, every freightcar on the layout should be within a five year time span as to reweigh dates. To change the date on a model, mask around the date, and paint either black or a different shade of boxcar red than the body color. Then letter in the new reweigh date. I used a Clover House alphabet. See advertisement in model railroad magazines. While most roads reweighed their own cars, once a great while one would see a reweigh symbol from a foreign RR.

Here are the reweigh symbols that are in my files: ACL - FLO Florence, SRM South Rocky Mount, LAKD Lakeland, TPA Tampa, SAN Sanford and WX Waycross. C&WC - AUG Augusta. CN&L - COL Columbia. SAL - HAM Hamlet, RAL Raleigh, JAX Jacksonville, SF (unknown), PTS Portsmouth Va. GA - H'VILLE Harrisonville GA. Lancaster & Chester - L&C or LC Lancaster, SC. HPT&D - DN Denton NC. Fruit Growers Express - AX Akexandria Va, ATL Atlanta, JAX Jacksonville and HAM Hamlet.

Anybody know the reweigh initials for the Winston-Salem Southbound? WSSB was jointly owned by the N&W and ACL.

-- Tom Underwood (tlu1650@attglobal.net), June 04, 2004.


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