Armored rail cars in Vietnam

[Terry Toenges]

Thanks Joe. My thought was that maybe the long poles were to catch trip wires.

[jbrock27]

Maybe Tsquared.  But aren't trip wires typically low to the ground?
Glad you came back in one piece too!

[GG1onFordsDTandI]

Thanks Joe. My thought was that maybe the long poles were to catch trip wires.

I think if you were out to get a locomotive, or the engineer, placing trip wires up high would make some sense. But why the wires parallel to the track?   

[Loco Bill Canelos]

The poles are not antenna related.  The units which were radio equipped(not all were)had a whip antenna attached to one end of the car.  You can actually see the whip antennas on the first car in pic one and on the second car in pic two if you look closely.  The armored cars as we used them were strictly to check track in front of a train, trip any bombs that were in the track and to protect the crew while doing it .  The idea being it was a lot cheaper to lose an armored car than a locomotive, or train cargo.  There were a lot of armored car like the ones in the pics, but I never found out who the manufacturer was.   

Equipment on the VNR was almost all French built, and I believe the Armored cars were also French built as were all the steamers I saw on the dead line.  US equipment was the meter gauge GE U8B loco's and there were also some aluminum Australian boxcars, which we never used as we primarily needed hoppers for gravel service and flats and gondolas were the preferred cargo carriers for all types of cargo.  I was a lot easier to load and unload flats and gons under rough or difficult conditions using rough terrain forklifts.  The forklifts were easy to use as a mini crane to unload a gondola.

The Aussie boxcars which were in our area of operations were used by the Vietnamese soldiers and their families as homes, and were all parked on an unused siding close to the armored car track and the engine service facilities.

In my time there I learned how well off we here in the US compared to the locals.  I learned to respect them, as I watched them struggle to take care of there families just like we do at home.

An example I like to cite was a family of Mom and Dad and four kids, a boy about 14, a girl maybe 12 a boy 7 and a girl maybe four or five.  They made a living(if you could call it that) making gravel by hand .  Yup! by hand.  We would go by while all of them with their hammers and chisels busted big rocks into gravel.  The little girl carried broken pieces to the pile.   The sight of this is burned in my brain because I had a daughter the age of the little girl.   

It took them a week to make a pile equal to about one bucket load that would fit our front loader.   We would pay about 50 cents for the load.   If I couldn't go myself I sent one of my men to buy the gravel even if we didn't need it.  I always brought goodies for the kids and Mom and Dad or had them sent.   It was heartbreaking to see this and other examples.   The food waste from our mess hall was highly coveted by the locals and it was not used for animal feed.  We wasted a lot, and it was hard for me to watch at times. 

I usually repress my war experiences, but it seems like yesterday.

Back to Armored cars,  I am sure the poles were meant for camo support, but we never used it in our area.  some of our sidings were near woody areas and Armored cars at the end of a siding in these areas could have been well hidden while making the siding look shorter.

I am going to be out of the country for the next seven days, but will try to post some pics when I get back if I can figure out how to convert slides to JPEG images, if there is any interest. 

Thanks to all for the kind comments as well.

Bill

[GG1onFordsDTandI]

I was so busy looking at the corner poles, I missed the whip antennas .  Thank you for taking time, and having the courage to relay info from a difficult time. I for one, am always interested in hearing about "our Heros" .

[Ken G Price]

I never saw any tracks or trains in Nam, though I spent little time at major cities, bases, and ports.
Maybe they hid these things from the Marines. Saw lots of three, plus inch cockroaches though.