image source: http://www.rr-fallenflags.org/misc-u/unk-b107.jpg
Table supra from the roster of equipment of the Washington and Old Dominion Railroad
compiled by Ames W. Williams (The Washington and Old Dominion Railroad [1966/68])
Today the term AutoRailer™ (note the capitalizations) appears to have become a trademarked name and is employed in reference to various sorts of trailer and van whose purpose is to transport cars from their point of origin to a dealership.
However, before highway systems were as broadly and as well developed as they are today in the United States, Europe, etc. (and still in places where, for whatever reason, tracks are laid but few roads are paved), vehicles other than trains were occasionally fitted to be able to travel on train tracks. As its name indicates, the Evans autorailer (or auto-railer) was bimodal, and could be quickly reconfigured to travel, as needed, on either rails or roads.
The phrenetic churn of the internet is such that, at any given moment, images of/information concerning these bimodal vehicles may be available (only to vanish when dreaded link-rot strikes, a moment later). Assembled here is a collection of data both useful and somewhat stable (it is hoped) from a number of sources.
•a fluctuating assortment of supplemental links pertinent to the autorailer:
(1) a note on the NOVA autorailer at Arlington's Virginia Room
(2) a former NOVA autorailer ("Vienna" destination still showing) photographed in Indiana in 1963
(3) a brief video clip of an autorailer operating in Rosslyn in 1936
(4) an advertisement for the Evans autorailer which appeared in Fortune Magazine in the late 1930's
(5) a collection of images of various versions of the autorailer
Anyone browsing this page who either knows of other images of autorailers on the web or has one that may be shared,
please drop the webmaster a message.
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A promotional film, produced by Chevrolet Leader News in 1935,
for the recently introduced Evans Autorailer
(from the Prelinger Archives; click on the image below to view/download & view)
In the same year as the film supra, a semi-popular publication
addresses the apparent novelty of the vehicular hybrid
An advertisement for the Evans Autorailer,
from Life Magazine (November 1, 1943)
(Click on the image infra to view the entire page;
many thanks to Michael G. Richards for identifying the source of this advertisement)
Schematic of an Evans Autorailer
235hp 0-6-0Ds, USA/TC 7731-8
At the end of World War II, Evans built for the U.S. military in Europe (specifically, the USA/TC) a small number of autorailers. These shunting diesel locomotives, small and bimodal, were particularly well suited to relatively easy conversion between travel on the then much disrupted railways and on the roads. All six wheels, ordinary truck tires upon which rested the entire weight of the car, were driven by a hydraulic transmission. Two retractable pairs of flanged guide wheels, 16 inches in diameter, assured bimodality; when not on the railway tracks, the vehicle was steered by the rear wheels beneath the cab.
(Many thanks to Rudi Heinisch for the reference to R. Tourret, Allied Military Locomotives of the Second World War [Abingdon, Tourret Publishing, 1995], from which the schema and information are taken) |
An Erstwhile Alaskan School Bus
photo formerly at http://www.alaska.net/~rmorris/chitna1.jpg, but now evaporated --
• SIC TRANSEUNT IMAGINES RETICULI •
A Decaying Autorailer in Superior, WI
(photos graciously supplied by Kris Roenigk of Oshawa, Ontario, Canada)
Quislings' Command Car
| In Closely Watched Trains (1966; DVD ed. 2001 [04/20:10ff]), Jirí Menzel employs to an effect both comic and symbolic the cumbersomely bimodal variety of autorailer pictured below: an ordinary automobile, whose tires are not, in the usual manner, partially deflated and supplemented by smaller, retractable pilot wheels (a costly refitting, of course), has been stripped of its rubber tires (appropriated for military use?) in order to ride the rails chiefly on the ludicrously large rims of its tires. In the scene in question (set in the closing months of 1944), the vehicle gently forces forward its occupants, quisling Czechs in the service of the Nazi occupation, when it exits briskly in reverse from the train station of a sleepy village in occupied Czechoslovakia (which country, in 1993, was irenically dissolved and reconstituted, of course, as the Czech Republic and Slovakia). |
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