I thought I had asked this in the past. If so, I would have saved the information. But cannot find anything in my files. Going back to the heyday of the Per Diem boxcar rage, I am looking for information on the 1974 built Railbox cars, by Paccar. (We still called it "PC&F".) I was working on what was called the "New Car Line", where they were assembled. Specifically I am seeking the car numbers we built at that time. I recall that one order was at least 1500 cars. With those numbers in hand, I would like to find a model example simply as a memory. Can anyone help with my quest?
Lately I've been quizzing ChatGPT on things and asked it about this subject. According to it, The first Railbox cars were built by PC&F in 1974 were numbered 10000 to 10999 and were the first cars built for Railbox. Sometimes ChatGPT is wrong, as I have found out asking it some baseball history questions. But at least this is something. It give two locations for the new car line - Tacoma and Renton.
The picture I took of RBOX 10367 in the summer of '75 has an ACF stencil, so as you suspected, ChatGPT needs a little fine tuning. This car was built 12/1974. As a teen, I thought these cars were the coolest things on steel wheels and I still think they looked great when new.
As seen in the photo posted by Hardcoaler, that number series seems to belong to American Car & Foundry. ("XAF") I am fairly certain we built 1500 cars in our first run. That started in about late June of 1974, right after a loooooong and actually unproductive strike by the Boilermakers Union. I believe we finished that order in about September. "New Car Line" was an inside the Renton plant term. The "Old Car Line" was the former Seattle Car & Foundry (west) side of the plant. On that side was the foundry, old assembly line, sheet metal shop and carpentry shop. During WWII the New Car Line side was converted to producing military vehicles. There was still evidence of that in the pavement.
