50' St. Cloud Built Box Car

Prototype Information

In late 1956, Great Northern’s St. Cloud shops transitioned to a larger 50-foot general service boxcar design. This shift directly answered the needs of Pacific Northwest timber, metal, and mineral shippers. The new workhorses utilized pre-manufactured Youngstown sides and off-the-shelf components. They featured a 15-foot offset double-slider door opening designed for modern forklift loading. To reinforce this wide opening against mechanized stress, builders added distinctive diagonal panel gussets to the sides. While material fabrication began in late 1956, the first completed cars rolled out in January 1957. Built to a strict Plate B clearance, these cars enjoyed unrestricted interchange service across the US, Canada, and Mexico.

St. Cloud built 1,000 of these durable boxcars for the GN and 500 more for its sibling road, the Spokane, Portland and Seattle (SP&S). Together, these 1,500 cars became the dominant fleet workhorses for decades. The initial orders wore a striking Vermillion Red scheme with “super” large slanted Great Northern lettering. As the years passed, the cars carried various iconic liveries, including Glacier Green and the post-1966 Big Sky Blue. Most survived into the Burlington Northern era, trading their classic GN colors for Cascade Green. After 1973, BN put many of these dependable cars through extensive Capital Rebuild Programs to extend their active service lives.