After all of the design, engineering, manufacturing, sales and marketing work for a car was completed, automakers then faced a logistical problem: how to get the product from their centralized factories to the consumers scattered across the country. In the early days of the automobile, when buyers were few, it was a viable option to stick two autos in a train boxcar and ship them off.
But as demand began to grow, the shipping capacity had to match. Sometime in the 1940 America’s auto manufacturers, in collaboration with the railroads, developed a special car-carrying boxcar that would utilize the overhead space. At 50 feet in length, it had ten extra feet on the standard 40-foot boxcars of the time.
Loading the thing was a pain in the neck, as a car was manually pushed inside, then jacked up towards the ceiling at an angle to accommodate a car coming in underneath it. (You can see that the illustration above is clearly incorrect; each set of cars should be flipped horizontally, or there would be no way to drive the lower cars in from each end.)
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