Gondola, 48 Foot, Steel Coil

History: Strip or sheet steel has long been a major component in the manufacturing of many different products including pipes, tanks, household appliances - both large and small, industrial shelving, machinery, freight cars, and especially automobiles. Cold-rolled or hot-rolled, varying in width from less than an inch to ten feet, and ranging in thickness from 1/64th of an inch to 1/4th of an inch, the steel was originally cut into sheets in customer specified lengths. After World War II, winding the steel strip into a coil almost completely replaced the sheets. The steel coil with 3,000 to 5,000 feet of steel is much easier to handle and transport than a stack of steel sheets. Coils are also far more versatile than a sheet that may be too long for one usage or too short for another.
The biggest challenge for railroads and the automobile industry, the primary user of coiled steel, was how to transport it efficiently. In the 1960s, the Ford Motor Company, working with the Detroit Toledo & Ironton and the Chesapeake & Ohio railroads, came up with the design of the coil steel car. The original design was a heavy-duty frame with two 24-foot troughs covered by hoods made of thin steel. The troughs and movable load dividers prevented the coils from rolling side-to-side or sliding while the hoods protected the coils from the weather. Several freight car builders built coil steel cars, including Thrall Car Manufacturing which built these 48-foot, twin hood cars in the 1980s and 1990s. The first Thrall cars had a 100-ton capacity, but later versions were built to a 125-ton capacity. Wearing the protective hoods on, the car can carry coils up to 7 feet in diameter. They can carry coils up to 10 feet with the hoods removed. The flat-top hoods from the first designs have been replaced with a rounded top design that is both easier to manufacture and is stronger.

Railroad/Company: Thrall Car Manufacturing Company was a manufacturer of railroad freight cars in Chicago Heights, Illinois from 1917 to 2001. The company was sold to Trinity Industries in 2001. A.J. Thrall established the Union Wagon Company in 1916, selling used and reconditioned rail car components. This became the Thrall Car Manufacturing Company in 1917. By mid-century, under the leadership of Richard L. Duchossois, the company focused on building specialized freight cars, such as high-cube boxcars for auto parts, all-door boxcars for building products, gondolas, rotary-dump gondolas for coal, bulkhead flatcars and centerbeam flatcars for lumber, double-stack container cars, covered hoppers, autorack cars and single-level trailer cars. In the 1980s, Thrall acquired five competing railcar manufacturers, including autorack builders Whitehead & Kales and Portec, and became the largest such manufacturer of these cars in the United States. In 1984, Duchossois purchased the remaining shares of the company owned by the Thrall family, and the company then operated as part of Duchossois Industries. In the 1990s, Thrall had a production capacity of over 16,000 freight cars per year, with more than 3,000 employees.

From 1997, a European subsidiary Thrall Europa manufactured wagons in York, UK. Thrall Europa, York works closed 2002. In 2000, Thrall Europa acquired the railway vehicle manufacturer ČKD Vagonka Studénka (Czech Republic), renamed Thrall Vagonka Studénka. In 2006 Trinity Industries sold off its European operations to International Railway Systems. The closely held company was sold to Trinity Industries, based in Dallas, Texas, in 2001. The company was subsequently renamed Trinity Rail Group, LLC.

From Wikipedia