Magor Car

Company History: The Magor Car Corporation had its beginnings in 1899 in the partnership of Basil Magor and Fred Wonham. We don’t know just what the intent of that partnership was, though one might speculate that it was a civil engineering consultancy, since Basil—born and raised in Montreal—had graduated just five years before from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute at Troy, NY, with a degree in civil engineering. In 1902, the partnership led to a manufacturing operation at Clifton, New Jersey, called the Wonham-Magor Engineering Works. Being close to the port of New York, the works specialized in railcars for export. (Or conversely, the export business of the partnership may have led to the choice of location for, as Kaminski {86} notes “the plant was one of the closest to port of any car builder in the United States and eliminated practically all inland freight expense and transit delays.”

Magor was sold in 1964 to the Fruehauf Corporation. One authority estimates that Magor was then capable of producing more than 5,000 units annually. But sales were steadily declining, and the company went out of business in 1973.

Between 1899 and 1973, Magor produced some 95,000 cars. Most were industrial style cars for mine, sugar mill, track maintenance, etc., and perhaps the greatest number went to export customers. But Magor built for the domestic market as well, being perhaps best known for its cabooses and its air dump cars. During its last decades it specialized in aluminum bodied cars, notably covered hoppers such as the well-known Big Johns of the Southern Railway.

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