Bluford Shops - 65227 - Open Hopper, 2-Bay, Rib Side, 8-Panel - Chesapeake & Ohio - 325302

Specific Item Information: This group of Chesapeake & Ohio 8-panel hoppers was the product of a mid-60s rebuild program at C&O’s Raceland Shops. A portion of the fleet later received four yellow ribs on each side denoting that they were assigned to Armco Steel (the yellow circle next to the road number was a signal to carmen and agents that this car was for unit train service and should not be confiscated.) Changing traffic patterns and car availability rendered these markings superfluous and these hoppers scattered across the region. This paint scheme will be available in 6 road numbers.

Model Information: 2016 - Bluford Shops is proud to announce an all new body style for your N scale freight car fleet. These 8-Panel 2-Bay Hoppers have never been available before in N. These ready-to-run cars feature: die cast slope sheet-hopper bay-center sill assembly; injection molded plastic sides, ends, and hopper doors; fully molded brake tank, valve and air lines; body mounted brake hose detail; load; body mounted magnetically operating knuckle couplers; close coupling; and Fox Valley Models metal wheels.

Prototype History: In the 1960s, Chesapeake & Ohio’s earliest offset side hoppers were coming due for rebuilding. Rather than fabricating new offset sides, C&O’s Raceland Shops opted for new sides with 8 full length panels joined with external ribs. This made the cars cheaper to rebuild and maintain. It also extended the service lives of the cars into the 1980s. C&O would go on to rebuild over 15,000 cars into 8-panel hoppers. Baltimore & Ohio sent many of their offset side hoppers over to the Raceland Shops of their sister road C&O for rebuilding into 8-panel hoppers. By this time, B&O had adopted C&O’s Futura demi-bold lettering for reporting marks and road numbers but B&O’s capitol dome logo persisted. These cars also operated well into the 1980s.

Road Name History: The Chesapeake and Ohio Railway (reporting marks C&O, CO) was a Class I railroad formed in 1869 in Virginia from several smaller Virginia railroads begun in the 19th century. Led by industrialist Collis P. Huntington, it reached from Virginia's capital city of Richmond to the Ohio River by 1873, where the railroad town (and later city) of Huntington, West Virginia was named for him.

Tapping the coal reserves of West Virginia, the C&O's Peninsula Extension to new coal piers on the harbor of Hampton Roads resulted in the creation of the new City of Newport News. Coal revenues also led the forging of a rail link to the Midwest, eventually reaching Columbus, Cincinnati and Toledo in Ohio and Chicago, Illinois.

By the early 1960s the C&O was headquartered in Cleveland, Ohio, USA. In 1972, under the leadership of Cyrus Eaton, it became part of the Chessie System, along with the Baltimore and Ohio and Western Maryland Railway. The Chessie System was later combined with the Seaboard Coast Line and Louisville and Nashville, both the primary components of the Family Lines System, to become a key portion of CSX Transportation (CSXT) in the 1980s. A substantial portion of Conrail was added in 1999.

C&O's passenger services ended in 1971 with the formation of Amtrak. Today Amtrak's tri-weekly Cardinal passenger train follows the historic and scenic route of the C&O through the New River Gorge in one of the more rugged sections of the Mountain State. The rails of the former C&O also continue to transport intermodal and freight traffic, as well as West Virginia bituminous coal east to Hampton Roads and west to the Great Lakes as part of CSXT, a Fortune 500 company which was one of seven Class I railroads operating in North America at the beginning of the 21st century.

At the end of 1970 C&O operated 5067 miles of road on 10219 miles of track, not including WM or B&O and its subsidiaries.

Read more on Wikipedia.

Brand/Importer Information: Bluford Shops began in 2007 as a side project of two model railroad industry veterans, Craig Ross and Steve Rodgers. They saw a gap between road names available on N scale locomotives but not available on cabooses. They commissioned special runs of Atlas cabooses in Atlantic Coast Line, Central of Georgia, Monon, Boston & Maine and Southern plus runs on Grand Trunk Western and Central Vermont on the MDC wooden cabooses. While these were in process, they began to develop their first all new tooling project, 86' Auto Parts Boxcars in double door and quad door editions in N scale. By January of 2008, Bluford Shops became a full time venture. Along with additional N scale freight cars and their own tooling for new cabooses, they have brought their own caboose line to HO scale. They also have their popular Cornfields in both HO and N. The future looks bright as they continue to develop new products for your railroad.

The town of Bluford in southern Illinois featured a small yard on Illinois Central's Edgewood Cutoff (currently part of CN.) The yard included a roundhouse, concrete coaling tower (which still stands) and large ice house. Reefer trains running between the Gulf Coast and Chicago were re-iced in Bluford. Things are more quiet now in Bluford with the remaining tracks in the yard used to stage hoppers for mines to the south and store covered hoppers. Intersecting the IC line in Bluford is Southern Railway's (currently NS) line between Louisville and St. Louis. Traffic on this single track line remains relatively heavy.