Hicube Boxcar
In recent years "hicube" — "high cubic capacity" — boxcars have become more common in the USA. These are higher than regular boxcars and can only run on routes with increased clearance (see loading gauge and structure gauge). The excess height section of the car end is often marked with a white band so as to be easily visible if wrongly assigned to a restricted gauge line.
A very special Class of “high-cube” boxcar was the X60 class series 8 door type introduced in the mid 1960s on American railroads to haul bulky but light-weight automotive parts such as body panels and were a massive 86 feet in length.
At least one known car of this type survives today at the Pennsylvania Historical & Museum Commission, Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania, Strasburg, PA.
The car owned by the museum was built by Pullman Standard in their Bessemer, Alabama shops for the New York Central Railroad as one of an order of thirty. It passed to the New York Central’s successors Penn Central in 1968, and then Conrail in 1976. Conrail rebuilt and renumbered the car in 1986 and subsequently transferred it to their Philadelphia employee training center in the late 1990s for use as a teaching aid.
These cars are one of the rarest, largest and most difficult to find railway cars in the United States. Currently very little information about them exists and is the only known mass produced box car to have a total of 8 sliding plug type doors(4 on each side),and most have been scrapped and few if any remain in service today.
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