Heavyweight horse cars and baggage cars. Drains?

The floors appeared level without drains in the baggage cars I've seen though can't say I was looking for any. My reference books don't show any like on reefers.

Rattler21,

This may be a long shot, but, you might find what you are looking for in the issue of the "Keystone Vo.49, #4. Winter 2016" from the PRRT&HS - https://www.prrths.org/content...91&item_id=13617  There is an article in there about moving racehorses by rail.

Thats a good question!  From experience I can tell you horse urine is ungodly corrosive.  My last boss (an oil sheik) during my time in the horse business had to scrap a 747 when it failed an airworthiness inspection.  Horse urine had degraded the airframe under the main level floor.  I've also seen it degrade all sorts of stone and masonry in short order.  I can't imagine those cars not having similar issues.

You might reach out to the Austin Steam Train Association. They have a AT&SF horse car that they use as a museum car. It saw MOW service out of Temple, TX.

I do not know about horse cars, but in the Santa Fe baggage car i am familiar with the side doors ran in slots below the floor level. At the ends of these slots there were drain pipes. Maybe 1” pipe that ended only a few inches below the underside of the floor. These drains would have picked up water from the outside of the door when it was open and any seal leakage. If this was not drained it would have frozen and jammed the door in cold weather. I do not remember how these interfaced with the fish racks. These were no fish racks in the doorway, just between the doors.

From my horse raising days, I can tell you that thick white oak planks are pretty tough stuff and stand up to a lot of horse wear and urine/manure issues.   If you ever go into a professionally built horse stable built in the 1960s or 70s, you will still see lots of it.   

And, eventually, after many years of wear and tear and abuse, you just replace it.

Horse and cattle trailers use to have their metal floors lined with it.   (And the owners just hosed out the trailers after they was used.)

I am not sure how the railroads protected the underlying metal in the rail cars, but perhaps they just hosed the cars out as well.

I can tell you that two layers of 30# tar paper is darned near indestructible as far as liquids, so perhaps they put down something like this underneath the planks.

Horses and cattle can slip and fall pretty easily on wet metal surfaces, so it would be hard to understand the rail cars just having them stand on metal floors.

Mannyrock