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What an interesting catch.
Ballast cars full of sand for extra braking? That’s a new one to me…..maybe things were done differently back then, but generally speaking the idler cars are for balancing the weight on bridges and other infrastructure…..
Needless to say this is a great picture!!
The hoppers were about half full based on capacity. The situation was simply that the railway did not think the two Babcock and Wilcox 12 axle cars possessed enough braking capacity properly control the train. Partially loaded cars were used because of the fear that empty cars would derail too easily in a heavy braking situation. Agreed that normally empty cars were used to spread the load away from the locomotive, but not in this case. Thanks for the comment.