Philly Railfan Pictures of the Week

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Railfan Pictures of the Week - 3/23/2025

While making a trip down to see one of SEPTA's new engines sitting in Abrams Yard, I saw a string of Conrail H1K hoppers sitting on the old scale track at Bridgeport PA on August 4 2024.

But they weren't Conrail hoppers anymore, as NS, their second owner, had sold them to Dyer Quarry and now wear DQYX reporting marks, although their old Conrail Quality logo remains on most of the cars. To my knowledge, none of the H1K's ever wore NS reporting marks. Dyer Quarry is just up the NS Harrisburg Line in Berks County and is a source of diabase, also called trap rock, a hard stone used for railroad ballast and as aggregate in construction. Previously the H1K hoppers were associated with Conrail's service to another rock quarry, Wimpey Materials in Annvillle PA.

The 200 cars in the H1K class were built new for Conrail in 1992. They are sometimes mistaken for ballast cars because of what they are usually carrying, but you can see from the orientation of the discharge doors they are not. With their heavy use and light gray slab sides, they took a heavy beating from both rust like DQYX 493060 and grafitti like DQYX 493040.

A small number like DQYX nee-CR 493076 avoided both those perils, mostly.

Another relatively untouched car was DQYX nee-CR 493114.

An even smaller number have been repainted completely like DQYX nee-CR 493027, losing any vestige of their Conrail heritage.

When the scale in Bridgeport was in use under Conrail, ore trains coming out of South Philadelphia would run through it before they got too far west. Overweight cars were an issue for the Reading as they did not have dedicated ore jennies like the Pennsylvania Railroad, and instead used open hoppers that were designed for a much less dense commodity, coal. The coal hoppers could only be filled about of third of the way before hitting their maximum weight. But even the ore trains with the ex-PRR G38's and G39's were run through the scale, presumably just to make sure. Now that the scale is now longer in service, the scale track is just a parking lot.

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