ELECTRIC BOXCABS - There were (and even are) jillions and zillions of other boxcab electrics; the Pennsy specialized in them and the Great Northern wasn't far behind.  However, this page overloaded, so I've separated out the electric boxcabs and created a new page, ELECTRIC BOXCABS, et seq.

OLD LINKS now directed to ELECTRIC BOXCABS Page:

MILW #102000.

Piedmont & Northern #5103 N&W's ELECTRIC BOXGON!

TEXAS-MEXICAN BOXCABS

Few boxcabs were odder, as a sizeable group, than those bought or assembled by the Texas-Mexican Railway, originally a U.S. RR (1856) which later ran from Corpus Christi into Mexico (1877), then was acquired by the Mexican government (Ferrocarriles de Mexico, ca. 1900), sold to Transportaçion Maritima Mexicana (in 1982), and finally acquired (49%) by the KCS (in 1995) and still running!  Starting with seven (7) boxcabs from Whitcomb with DeLaVergne engines, #501-507, delivered from Jul through Sep 1939, B&M #1141, a St. Louis Car Co. railcar with a Cooper-Bessemer engine, #508, two Baldwin boxcabs with Baldwin engines, #509-510; they finally ended up with two more St. Louis Car Co. units with Cooper-Bessemer engines in Jul 46, #700A/B, and two again in Aug 47, #701A/B, all with Westinghouse gear.  By then, several endcab units had also appeared, but not before these boxcabs were renumbered so many times I can't really follow it and some renumbered back again, and some were converted to endcabs and at least one converted back to a boxcab, and paired units broken up and single units paired, etc., etc., etc., ad infinitum!  Do you wonder I call them odd?

All of this is spelled out in excruciating detail in Extra 2200 South ("a quarterly magazine dedicated to railroad diesel locomotives in North America"), Issue No. 42, Sep-Oct 73 (out of print).

Suffice it to say that, since I will not violate copyright, I must rely on readers contributions to illustrate this odd lot; here's #600A/B and here's #503 and 506 rebuit as endcabs:

[Only one image survived the AT&T WorldNet Light bloodbath but I was able to restore all the othera (09 Feb 2005)!  However, in the interest of saving bandwidth, these images have been cropped, some heavily, but never at the sacrifice of the boxcab image.]   (09 Feb 05)

(Tex-Mex photos courtesy of Jesse Patton)
[Thumbnail images - click on photos for larger images.]

(left photo by J.Patton, 1961; right photo 1940, from J. Patton Collection)
[Left thumbnail image - click on photo for larger image.]

{torn edge "prettified" by SB,III}
(Tex-Mex photos courtesy of J. Patton)

{image further "prettified" by J. DeLong}
(original Tex-Mex photo courtesy of J. Patton)

I blew up underbody details and artificially lightened them so some vague semblance of the engine trucks would show:   (09 Feb 05)

Jim DeLong contacted the Kansas City Southern Historical Society and got back vauable additional information about these odd TexMex locos:   (19 Feb 05)

"The 600's were composed of four of the former 501-507-series boxcabs joined together with drawbars into two-unit sets as follows:

These 500's had double cabs, but around 1950, the 600's got their facing inner cabs blanked over with sheet metal.nbsp; Numbers 501-503 were later converted into road switchers.

Any photo of 501-507 before their conversions should be useful to you in modeling a 600.  There is a photo of 502 from the collection of J. C. Seacrest on page 420 of THE SECOND DIESEL SPOTTER'S GUIDE by Jerry A. Pinkepank (Kalmbach Books, 1973).  There are half-page photos of 501, 502, 503, and 600 from the collections of R. H. Carlson, Harry Reynolds, and Jesse Patton in the Nov./Dec. 1997, Jan. 1998 Volume 2 Number 3 issue of JOURNAL OF TEXAS SHORTLINE RAILROADS AND TRANSPORTATION.  That entire 60-page issue is devoted to the Tex Mex."

For those who have, or can get hold of, Jerry A. Pinkepank's original Diesel Spotter's Guide, Kalmbach, 1967, the photo of #502 appears on page MISC-7 and one of #700 on page MISC-10.   (19 Feb 05)

That about does it for the moment.