Text by Patrick Bell.
Today we have some cars and trucks that were working on the railroad. There is a good variety of track inspection vehicles that were equipped to carry people, as well as trucks and a couple of executive rides. So let’s head for the tracks.
It was a wet day for this track inspector who appeared to be waiting for someone. Parked on a side track was a ’59 Ford Country Sedan 4 door with possibly a Virginia license plate.
This looks like it was simple conversion, just change out the wheels. A ’41-’46 Chevrolet AK Light Delivery Pickup with a canvas canopy and towing a small trailer. A photo search revealed the location as Flagstaff, Arizona, with Mount Elden in the background.
The Chesapeake and Ohio Railway Company’s ’54 Jeep “Hy-Rail” A-31 Utility Wagon. The Hy-Rail was built on a 4 door body by Fairmont Railway Motors, Inc., specifically for the railroad industry. The narrow front bumper allowed room for the axle to fold up out of the way for highway usage. I am sure the Jeep’s four wheel drive greatly improved traction on the steel rails.
Here was an executive car for the Cleveland, Cincinnati, Chicago and St. Louis Railway, also known as the Big Four Railroad. It was a ’55 Crown Imperial 8 Passenger Sedan or Limousine. If you look closely under the bumper, you can see the retracted railway wheels. Apparently they were either mounting or dismounting it from the tracks. Following behind was a ’56 Pontiac.
And another ‘Hy-Rail” conversion, this one on a ’57 Pontiac Chieftain Safari 9 passenger wagon. At first glance the Poncho looks like it had seventies style five mile per hour bumpers. In the background was a neighborhood of new ranch style homes.
This one was ’54-’60 Jeep Pickup with Hy-Rail A-30 conversion. It looked new or close to new and may have been a promotional photo of some sort. A previous CC discussion on this unit is HERE.
The New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad Company, commonly known as the New Haven, owned this ’54 Cadillac Fleetwood Series 75, and it was used by the president, Patrick B. McGinnis. His initials were even on the vanity Connecticut license plates. It was equipped with factory air conditioning, plus some special railroad pieces beyond the obvious rail wheels; a center mounted headlamp, and marker lights on the rear of the roof.
A ’56 Pontiac 860 9 Passenger with a Hy-Rail conversion that was with the Nevada Northern Railway Company. It now has been restored and is part of their museum in Ely, Nevada. And for a small fee you can drive it on a track and highway route of their choice.
Pontiac’s must have been the right size for the rails as they sure seemed popular. This one was a ’58 Chieftain 9-Passenger Safari.
A gentleman talking to headquarters on the radio in a ’59 Dodge Sierra 9-Passenger. It had a special Virginia license plate with the letters “CONV” in a square on the left. There may have been a train heading away in the far distance.
Perhaps ’59 Pontiac’s new “Wide-Track Wheels” feature was too wide for the tracks so they moved down to Chevrolets. This one was a ’60 Kingswood 9 Passenger on the ground with the track wheels retracted. That gave it an ‘overweight’ look, and I am sure it was carrying a few extra pounds. It belonged to the New York Central System and had what appears to be a Massachusetts license plate.
Here was a ’68 or ’69 Dodge A100 Pickup from Vermont on a winter day. I imagine they had to keep some weight in the back of this one for traction purposes. The boxcars in the background appear to be from the Canadian National Railway.
Another ’60 Chevrolet Kingswood 9 Passenger, this time riding the rails which improved its appearance somewhat. This one was a V8 model and had the ‘Hy-Rail” conversion. It belonged to the Reading Railroad, and a previous post is HERE.
For the final image of the day we have one that was not offered to the general public, a ’60 or ’61 GMC Crewcab with a short stepside bed. Other than the stepside it has a very contemporary stance, except it needs to be jacked up some more. It belonged to the Erie Lackawanna Railroad. The crew looked like they were waiting for a train to pass on the far track so they could continue on their way.
Thanks for joining us and have a great day!
When I was a kid, I had the Lionel Trains ‘track inspection’car’ in O Gauge. It resembled a `57-`59 generic looking Chrysler or De Soto station wagon.
Is it my small screen, or do some of the bumpers look like they were removed and flipped? The NY Central and Erie in particular.
Some of these cars and trucks have had their wheels altered to better fit on the tracks. The Cadillac 75 limo’s front wheels have a different offset than the back wheels, which had a wider track. The Jeep station wagon and pickup both look to have non-stock wheels with greater offset. The GMC truck in the last photo does too; it’s using dually wheels in the front without the special wider hub normally used with them. The ’60 Chevy wagons looks to have wider or deeper dished wheels, especially at the rear.
Here is a 1949 Cadillac rail car for the execs to ride the rails
That car looks oh-so-DONK-a-licious!
It’s even sporting a gangsta bullet hole on the front passenger window!
Check out the Colorado Railroad Museum website to see three of the “Galloping Geese” railcars that the Rio Grand Southern Railroad used in revenue service from the early 1930’s to the early 1950’s, when they found that their US mail contract couldn’t support 6-days-a-week steam operations. RGS ran in southwestern Colorado from Ridgway to Durango. The three vehicles at the Museum all run, with Goose #7 making regular passenger runs.
Fascinating pics and post.
In case anyone’s curious, the Virginia license plate w/ “CONV” on the left side (Picture #10 – ’59 Dodge wagon) was known as a “Convertible” plate.
These were pretty rare, and were issued mostly to station wagons that were used for commercial purposes, such as vehicles used to make deliveries, under the theory that those wagons could also be used – or ‘converted’ – to a passenger vehicle. Virginia first issued Convertible plates in the 1920s (back then just identified with a “C” prefix). The unusual double-stacked CONV letters were used starting in the late 1930s. These types of plates were issued until 1971.
Thanks for filling us in, Eric.
Growing up in the 1950’s when I would accompany my parents on trips to northwest Missouri, I would occasionally see passenger cars with the hyrail conversions on the tracks of the Burlington Railroad. Now all I see are pickups and heavy duty trucks with the hyrail conversions and they are used for track inspection or repair. Thanks for the interesting article.
A lot of rail service here in the Shenandoah Valley, never worked on a “car” type inspection vehicle but have worked on maintenance trucks and a dump truck where the bed was on a turntable. After the local feed mill busted a radiator pushing cars with feed truck they bought a “track-mobile” to move cars. Wild looking thing that has road wheels to move it around and steel wheels to ride the rails and shuffel cars, when getting on and off the track it looked like a camel getting up and down!
Great pictures! I’m glad Paul explained the wheel modifications as I had always thought that it was the rare vehicle that had an appropriate track to properly fit on the rails. But I guess that with wide enough wheels, the options increase. Still, you have to imagine that tire wear was an issue and that a car driven much on the Hy-Rail set up would need new tires quite frequently.
Around here, I frequently see big GMC pickups set up to do this, but never anything else.
I wonder what the process of getting a car up there on the rails actually looked like.
A few months ago, I watched a YouTube series about a fellow who converted a Japanese kei truck into an amateurish Hy-Rail vehicle. It took a great deal of trial and error to build it, and I kept thinking to myself, “You know you can just buy used Hy-Rail trucks, right?”
His goal was to drive some abandoned tracks and trestle bridges in the PNW, and he eventually got it right. It seems that operating a private vehicle on railroad tracks – even if abandoned – is technically illegal but the odds of prosecution are near zero.
It’s kind of a neat series, and you can see episode 1 here:
A suburban with a hyrail would make a nice bugout vehicle
I remember the first time I saw one of these as a kid.
My Dad and I used to go down to the Chesaco Avenue railroad crossing of the Pennsylvania Railroad (later Penn Central) to watch the trains go by.
On one of these days, the bells start ringing, the lights start flashing, and the gate goes down… So we wait… We were expecting to see a Metroliner or a GG1 pulling some cars go by, only to have it be a Chevy C10 (or its GMC equivalent) go by instead of a train.
To this day, I don’t know if I was disappointed, perplexed, or thrilled.
It was not what I was expecting, but it was kinda cool.
My Dad said they use these to inspect the tracks. When he was a kid, growing up in Scranton, PA, he would see cars and trucks like this all the time living near a railroad at the time.
Nice variety ! .
In the early 1990’s I was looking at used pickups and came across a Ford F150 with these wheels, they claimed the frame was bad so it sold for scrap .
-Nate
I worked as Trainmaster on the LIRR for many years. We put the Hy-rail trucks on the rails at grade crossings or places where the roadbed was built up for such purposes.
Ride parallel with the rails and put down the wheels… Smaller vehicles had hand jacks front and rear to lower the wheels / raise the car.
Not from the 50’s or 60’s, they’re GMT800 Chevrolet 2500’s or 3500’s with Union Pacific; I shot these in January 2007 in Tehachapi, California near the Tehachapi Loop
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tehachapi_Loop which is worth a detour off the highway 58 to check out. This gives a good side-by-side comparison between identical vehicles with and without rail wheels.
That “Ford” in the initial pic looks rather new.