Gondolas! Ah, Venice. 

Well not really. Omscaler is working on gondolas, but not the floating kind. As readers may know, a gondola is a railcar with low sides and an open top. Sort of a flat car with high sides. This ubiquitous car hauled anything that could be loaded and hauled out in the elements. Pipes, steel, sand, coal, gravel, wood. You name it. Sometimes, if hoppers were short, you would see more “gons” than hopper cars in the train. Once when I was riding in a car many years ago, the car was traveling alongside the railway. A couple of L&N gondolas had turned over and dumped many cubic yards of coal right beside the road. Why they had done this was a mystery to me. Both the road and railway were in a perfectly flat area. As a side note, sometimes gondolas come with bottom doors or side opening doors to dump the load. Normally the load is taken out the top. 'til next time, O sole' mio!, omscaler