Hopper cars are freight cars used to transport bulk materials, such as coal, ore, gravel, sand, cement, track ballast, plastic pellets, and food items such as grains and sugar. For those materials that can safely handle weather conditions, an open-top hopper is used. For those that require protection from weather and contaminants, closed-top hoppers are used. Hoppers are loaded from the top, and unloaded from the bottom (with the exception of those that are designed to be used in a rotary dumper). Hoppers are different from gondolas, in that they have one or more bottom-opening bays and sloped sheets on the interior to ease the unloading of their goods. Unloading is usually done by gravity, but some specialized hoppers have a built-in pneumatic pressure system to clear out their content (usually for those that carry food-grade commodities). Hoppers also tend to be full-height cars, whereas gondolas are usually more half-height (to allow for transporting of odd-shaped items). It is not unusual to see "unit trains" of coal or grain hoppers. Unit trains are those that have nothing but one type of car and one type of commodity in them. According to the Union Pacific web site, a single covered hopper carries enough grain to make 258,000 loaves of bread! For the sake of our Product Gallery listing, we consider side-dump cars and ore jennies to be a separate category from hoppers, while real railroads tend to classify these as hoppers as well.
Below are links to the various reports that show all of the S-scale hoppers ever produced. Click whichever report gets you to the information that wish to find. The bottom of this page has additional references that might be of interest.
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These definitions, in alphabetical order, may clarify some of the terms used in the reports linked to above:
Click the red header text for the external web site, listed here in alphabetical order; the sentence below it provides a high-level description of what you will find on that web page.