Horse Express Cars

If you look closely at the NYC cars it would appear the windows are covered.  They might be re-purposed baggage cars.

Reading the description of the cars, it appears more care was taken to build a car with the horse's safety in mind than the cars built to carry humans..... 

The only windows I can see are in the doors. The other openings appear to be louvered ventilation openings.

Buzz

Great post.  I never knew there was such a thing.

I'm still partial to the ones that pull up to the corral and let you load and unload horses with the push of a button.

With this title, l was expecting horse DRAWN cars, on 1800's urban street railways.  Guess those horse cars pictured rolled into Kentucky's Churchill Downs and the other Triple Crown sites, in the good old days.

I can't say for sure when the last horse car was used for Santa Anita racetrack, but it was around 1970.  The standard train to ship horses west on was the Grand Canyon.  For Santa Anita, the horse cars were set out at San Bernardino, and, as soon as the Grand Canyon departed, a boiler-equipped GP7 would couple onto the horse cars, make an air brake test, and head for Santa Anita, which had its own spur track and a dock for direct unloading.  Occasionally this was done from Los Angeles, but usually not.  However, there was Hollywood Park race track in Inglewood, and the horse cars would run through to Los Angeles and be forwarded from LAUPT, down the Harbor District to Inglewood.  I think they had to trailer the horses a short distance there.

Also . . . Pennsylvania Railroad also owned some horse cars and sometimes one of them would be billed to Santa Anita or Hollywood Park.

Tom,  Have you seen any photographs or schematics of railroad spurs at the race tracks?  John in Lansing, ILL

There is a 1952 Los Angeles Division Track Chart posted on the Santa Fe Railway Historical & Modeling Society website.

The Win

rattler21 posted:

Tom,  Have you seen any photographs or schematics of railroad spurs at the race tracks?  John in Lansing, ILL

The winter 2016 PRRT&HS Keystone has an article about the PRR and  horse racing titled "To the racetrack by rail".

http://www.prrths.com/estore/k...e_magazine.html#2016

Third Rail offered these cars a few years ago.  I purchased 2 of them in PRR tuscan.  They are really nice cars.

Norm

I shipped horses Hull &Smith  and flown em Flying Tigers but I would have given anything to ship by rail.   What a classy way to go.

Number 90 posted:

Also . . . Pennsylvania Railroad also owned some horse cars and sometimes one of them would be billed to Santa Anita or Hollywood Park.

Liljestrand and Sweetland's book Pennsylvania Baggage and Mail Cars has a section on the Pennsy's B74b horse cars.  Not a lot of detail on the interiors, but one comment stated one version had 24 stalls.  It was also hard to tell how many were built but it looks at least 15 with clerestory roofs between 1910 and 1916, and another 50 with round roofs between 1928 and 1930.

Norm posted:

Third Rail offered these cars a few years ago.  I purchased 2 of them in PRR tuscan.  They are really nice cars.

Norm

A minor regret is not buying one of these when 3rd Rail first offered them.  I've tried to buy the 3 rail version a couple of times but always outbid.  I want one, but not for $400+.

The Pennsylvania Railroad had a siding at Mt Washington about 5 - 7 miles north of Baltimore station on the Northern Central to Harrisburg.  It was used for loading / unloading horses bound for Pimlico race track which is the home of the Preakness.

The siding was about a mile or two from the race track and horses used to be shipped in / out via the PRR for Pimlico. My school bus went over a bridge that spanned the tracks, and on a few occasions I saw a B6 0-6-0 switcher sitting at Mt Washington with a horse car. This was somewhere around 1949-'52.

Canadian Pacific had a few different designs over the years.

    Here are a few examples taken from John Riddells excellent reference books on CPR Passenger and Freight rolling stock 

Al

Would putting a horse REA car at the front of a passenger train create a particular stink for them?

CAPPilot posted:

Liljestrand and Sweetland's book Pennsylvania Baggage and Mail Cars has a section on the Pennsy's B74b horse cars.  Not a lot of detail on the interiors, but one comment stated one version had 24 stalls.

Try here.....

http://prr.railfan.net/diagram...gg&sz=sm&fr=

I well remember a horse car or two spotted on the LIRR siding at the Belmont racetrack in the early 1960's. They were clearly visible from the mainline. I do not remember the roadnames, but the cars were usually Pullman green. At the time, I thought they looked like modified baggage cars.