How to read freight car stencils

The largest letters on a freight car are the reporting mark and the car number. TILX 123456 is a mark, TILX, and a number, 123456. Together they are how a person names that car. The same pair is repeated on both sides and usually on the ends, because you will not always be standing on the convenient side.

Read the mark before you read anything else. The other stencils describe the car. The mark identifies it. If the paint is weathered, walk to the other side or the end before you guess a letter. A wrong letter is a different car.

The weight block is usually a stack of short lines. CAPY is the older nominal capacity, a rounded design figure in pounds. LD LMT is the load limit, the most weight of freight that car is allowed to carry. LT WT is the light weight, the empty car from the last weighing, also in pounds.

Load limit and light weight belong together. The car is stenciled for a gross weight on the rail. Subtract the empty weight and what remains is the load limit. When the car is reweighed and the empty weight changes, the load limit is restenciled so the two still add up. A car can show a capacity number that no longer matches that pair. Capacity is the coarser figure. The load limit is the one that says what may be put in the car now.

None of these is a volume. Cubic feet on a covered hopper, or gallons on a tank, are separate stencils. The weight block is about pounds.

BLT is the month and year the carbody was built, sometimes with the builder's initials beside it. It is painted on the car. It is not a lookup into a private equipment register.

Keep the built date apart from the weighing dates next to it. NEW, when it appears, is the day the car was weighed new, and that month can differ from the build month. A reweigh date says when the light weight was checked. A rebuilt date, when both survive, is the later work: a stretch, a wreck repair, a new body on old trucks. If only one date is left, don't invent the other.

Somewhere along the side, often near the brake panel, is a short code for the kind of car. Newer cars carry a letter and three digits. The letter is the family. The digits narrow the fittings and a size band, and those digits mean different things in each family, so the letter is the part to trust on a first reading.

Older cars often show a mechanical designation of two to four letters instead, such as XM on a plain boxcar, LO on a covered hopper, HT on an open hopper, or GB on a gondola. Read that the same way. The letters name the kind of car. They do not name the owner, and they do not name the load.

A plate letter, such as Plate C or Plate F, is the clearance outline the car was built to. Height is measured above the top of the rail. The common plates are 10 feet 8 inches wide. A taller plate does not mean the car can go anywhere. It means the car needs a route with that clearance.

The letter on the car is what you write down. The published outlines, all 10 feet 8 inches wide, are Plate B at 15 feet 1 inch, Plate C at 15 feet 6 inches, Plate E at 15 feet 9 inches, Plate F at 17 feet, and Plate H at 20 feet 2 inches. That last one is the double-stack outline. A Plate F autorack and a Plate C boxcar are built for different routes.

Low on the side, often on the sill, is the consolidated stencil. Railfans call it the COTS panel. It gathers brake and inspection information that used to be painted as separate lines. The boxes changed over the decades. Read the labels that are actually there. A 1970s panel and a freshly painted panel are not the same form.

Inside or beside that panel you will find test dates: when the air brake was tested, and related servicing dates. Those dates are maintenance. They are not the built date, and they are not the load limit. The weight block is elsewhere. The placard, if the car is carrying a hazardous load, is elsewhere again.