I live across the street from a freight yard and occasionally watch them loading and unloading the trains all day. Last week, I noticed this odd-looking freight container stacked up with some others:
(the auto-focus picked out the fence in front, so it’s a little blurry. I’ll try and re-shoot it tomorrow morning)
It’s the same size and shape as the other containers, and has the normal base to fit on the flatcars, but it has a door and windows, like it’s made for people to ride in. I don’t remember ever seeing containers like this on any trains passing by. What are they used for?
I work on freight trains but still just a guess…probably just another container being shipped for a customer. Most of those container shipments get downloaded onto tractor trailers and taken off somewhere into the rest of the world.
I’ll go with lawoot’s guess. Probably a portable office for a contruction site. Or maybe just a guard building for a customer who has rail access. (You can buy prefab guard huts in industrial supply catalogs. Although the ones offered in Granger don’t look anything like that.)
Agreed. Although, the customer doesn’t necessarily need rail access. If it can fit on a flat wagon, it can fit on a truck. It’s just a pre-fab site office of some kind. they’re built to container specs for easy handling. There’s actually one on my local railway station, sitting right there on the platform - but right up the end out of the way. It’s used as some kind of lunch room for staff.
I don’t know about in the US, but here we have temporary “demountable” school classrooms. They are delivered via truck (or rail) in three container-sized segments. The end segments have two side walls and one outer wall, and the middle one has the side walls only. The three are simply bolted together on-site. I was taught in one thirty years ago, so the concept isn’t new.
Nitpicking my own post: now that I recall, the classroom segments were an oversize load for the trucks. A classroom three trucks wide still isn’t very wide.
Could it be an office or control cab for some big machine? Something similar to the big coal shovels that are shipped in pieces and assembled on-site. I can’t tell if those are joysticks in the left window, but I keep getting the impression that this thing is a piece of a bigger machine.
Portable office works, too, though. My dad worked out of a semi-trailer.
Locomotive evaluation cars are typically permanent railcars. The ones GE uses are former heavyweight passenger cars from the WWII era, among others. I suppose it could be part of a modular system, but it seems somewhat unlikely.
