Passenger car liquid waste disposal

Anybody besides the Alchemist remember getting a frost-bitten backside from sitting on a dry hopper in the dead of winter? Those flapper valves NEVER closed tight!

ExCon90 wrote:

Passenger wrote:I am vaguely recalling that some trains had holding tanks for a while before they all did.

Metroliner perhaps?

Metroliners certainly had some kind of chemical toilets right from the beginning (1968); I don't remember now when the law was passed covering all equipment.

That would be it then.

Southern Railroad overnight from Penn Station to Asheville by Pullman that year (and others too I assume) still dumped right on the tracks.

I rode one of the last Crescent runs in '78 (ended up getting drunk with an editor from Time magazine, who put my name in the article- which didn't sit well with RR unemployment, but that's a story for another time!). I remember thinking, I'm damn glad the divisions of the D&H I work on don't have passenger trains!