I would have never known this, probably because so few were actually built. Incredible.

This is an interesting subject. In the late 60's and early 70's international bulk shipping lines looked at the combination bulk liquid / Ore carrier. Again the same plan, a vessel that could load Iron ore on one run and crude oil on the next, a ship that would always have a charter. The reality was that one ship had double the amount of equipment so cost more form the yard, but then the harsh existence on the oceans caught up. The Oil pumping systems may not be used for six months and when required, whole sections required replacement, or the covers would not seal etc. in the end most combi carriers ended their lives carrying one type of load, with the ancillary equipment removed, and most ended up in the scrap yard early. Again, great idea, it just failed at it's execution.

@pulaski1

2 жыл бұрын

I am not sure that "failed at it's execution" is correct - I think the both the shipping and railroad "dual use" designs were a failure of concept, drawn up by people who didn't understand one _or both_ of the purposes that they were trying to design for. The result was that they ended up with a considerably more complex and expensive design that probably didn't do well at achieving _either_ of its intended purposes.

@daviddunsmore103

2 жыл бұрын

@@pulaski1 Yes, yet another example of something that was intended to be "the best of both worlds", but in reality was merely a compromise that did neither task as well as dedicated fleets of purpose built freight cars. Whenever someone brings up the subject of "flying cars", I point out that literally hundreds of designs have been tried out by creative people ever since both cars and aircraft have existed, yet we still don't have a safe, efficient, and affordable airworthy vehicle that is also street legal. Why? Simply because the attributes that make for a good flying machine are at odds with what makes for a good road vehicle. 🤔

@nativeafroeurasian

2 жыл бұрын

Well a containership or even multi-purpose-vessel does just that. Only it can take way less liquid per volume but at least it can carry it.

@AdurianJ

2 жыл бұрын

The fuel delivery truck at work carried etanol fuel one way and glue the other way. Guess what happened. All the fuel filters kept clogging up on all the inner city buses in Stockholm 😄

That was interesting, and I'm not even a train guy. This guy is a good speaker. Thank you.

In my country, Brazil, the State of São Paulo Railroad, the FEPASA, used a similar concept of box hoppers in the late 70s, known as the FHR series, they were converted from 1930s to 1950s vintage FRR series box cars adding from 8 to 16 small hopper chutes on the floor operated by a single twist bar that would open all the chutes on one side. Instead of using a hydraulic floor like the BN bopper, the FHR series had a metal grate covering the discarge chutes, but since they couldn't make the chutes very big (because you would have to cut into the cars struts) someone still had get inside with a broom to sweep the remaining grain off the floor and into to the chutes, the problem was when those cars were used to carry fertilizer and raw materials for fertilizer, which had tendency to compact rock solid during the trip and to dislodge it groups of 7 man had to climb into the cars armed with sledgehammers and shovels, digging and hitting the side of the cars until they were empty, it could sometimes take up to 5 hours to unload a single car. Today many FH series cars have been relegated to grain duty only or have been entirely phased out in favor of cylindrical hoppers (HT series) and conventional center flow hoppers (HF series).

@NorthShoreScenicRailroadDuluth

2 жыл бұрын

Thanks for sharing some insight on the subject from another country!

@fernandomarques5166

2 жыл бұрын

@@NorthShoreScenicRailroadDuluth No problem

Ah so the mystery behind these cars is finally solved in my mind. I remember seeing them when I visited in 2019 and thought “huh, those are peculiar boxcars, perhaps they’re some kind of reefer?” Now that I know they were an ambitious experiment gone wrong makes them all the more fascinating!

The obvious mistake was not including folding seats so they tripled as passenger cars.

@Thiefnuker

2 жыл бұрын

Have some passengers sit inside and fill up the gaps with sand, that's efficiency right there!

@dexter1981

2 жыл бұрын

or using some duct tape and it could quadruple as a tank car

@IndustrialParrot2816

2 жыл бұрын

what about just have grates instead of a floor

@fredblonder7850

2 жыл бұрын

@@IndustrialParrot2816 Can’t charge as much. ;-)

@Dennis-vh8tz

2 жыл бұрын

@@IndustrialParrot2816 Passengers wouldn't like the grate floors.

Those cars are really neat looking on the outside...kind of a bulkhead flatcar type end on them. I'm surprised at their build date. I was expecting very early 1970's, as a replacement for the old 40-foot grain boxcars. 1989 was a total surprise. It's nice to know that they got the "highball" to be built and tried. As was said in the video, they worked great on paper. Sometimes things just have to be tried in the real world to know whether they'll work or not. I'm glad they weren't all scrapped.

You are a good speaker - fun to watch/listen to - which makes the video both informing & entertaining.

The Boppers came into being just about the time I left the railroad and no doubt never made it into Toronto so I missed them. But as a truck driver I did get to pull the trailer equivalent of the Bopper. The hopper bottom van with fold up aluminum floors, roof panels and slope sheets to go along with hopper gates and barn doors. No walking floors and no hydraulics fortunately but a long non adjustable wheelbase which made weight distribution problematic. As a point of interest the railroad is able to "convert" boxcars for grain hauling by stretching heavy paper reinforced with steel strapping across the inner door openings leaving only the top of the door open for a belt conveyor to load the grain into the car. After unloading, the car would make a quick trip into the car shop to have the strapping removed for a return to regular service.

Where I live, our local feed mills would get box cars with grain in them They would be two thirds full of grain. When you slid the door open there was a plywood board holding in the grain on both sides. It was busted open and the grain spilled out to a conveyer bin and transported up into the silo. The feed mills closed a long time ago but I still remember the grain filled box cars.

“Shoestring” would love one of those books you shewed. Great video, thanks!

I remember seeing some of these go past near Chicago in the 80s. I used to love watching the trains when I was a kid, we lived right off a 3-track line. I always wondered why they were shaped differently! Thanks for the great explanation. Your presentation is incredibly professional!

@NorthShoreScenicRailroadDuluth

2 жыл бұрын

Thanks so much for watching Cody! Love that you may have spotted these cars once upon a time.

79 episodes worth the effort and the time to watch! Thanks Ken!

Wow, what an interesting... flop. Reminds me of 3 boxcars at The Pine Creek Railroad Museum I used to volunteer at. There are 3 boxcars on an isolated section of track next to the car barn. Each car has a different version of the Liberty Herald on them, though very faded. But what's REALLY interesting about these 3 boxcars is that if you look at the truck frames, they are stamped for C.R.R. OF P.A. (Central Railroad of Pennsylvania). This was an attempt at the railroad being labeled in a different, much cheaper tax bracket. Needless to say, state and government officials caught on pretty quickly, and the stamp was voided and no longer used on future builds. This information comes from a good friend of mine by the name of Tom Gallo, a Railroad Historian and Author of several books.

Initially, I thought this was a clickbait video. Glad I watched it. You learn something new.

WOW! a wonderful presentation, and a 'from the heart' ending. Thank you!

Another great video. My kudos to all who made this video. Thank you very much. Be safe and healthy please.

Great video. These bopper cars feel like a great example of overcomplicating something that really could have been simple and straight forward: Take the lower base of a hopper car, make a (perhaps easily removable) grating type floor with large spacing, add walls with doors a la box car that could seal tightly, and a hopper-ish roof. This way grain and such could loaded from above, which could just fall through the grating floor, acting like an ordinary hopper car, as well as being able to take typical box car cargo on said floor. And one step more could be to have the car be dividable into partitions, so it can haul both hopper and box car goods at the same time. This feels like it would have been a sure winner.

@kleetus92

2 жыл бұрын

The grating size would have to be dependant on what you're hauling. I think the problem you'd run into would be packing of the material to the point you'd not be able to get it out. But I see where you're going with it.

@beeble2003

2 жыл бұрын

99% of the time you see a company that has expertise in an area use a complicated solution, that means they already thought of your simple solution and rejected it. Whatever you use as a floor needs to be strong enough that you can drive a forklift on it and smooth enough that it doesn't shred cargo. It needs to prevent random junk from the box car cargo getting into the grain system.

@thomasboese3793

2 жыл бұрын

This BN idea was the second go-a-round for the idea. BCOL tried it in the 1970s, passed it to CN, who passed it to MILW. One car, three big fails.

Australian National in the 80s, after being left with a fleet of boxcars from containerisation, converted boxcars into hoppers. Car code "AHDL". There were fully converted to hoppers, but were known to be pains to railcrews. Crews took great pleasure in doing funeral runs of the cars to scrap yards.

@Gfysimpletons

2 жыл бұрын

Yeah, as proven with recent events, Australia, as a whole, should be scrapped!

@RN__4

2 жыл бұрын

@@Gfysimpletons What?

@briannem.6787

2 жыл бұрын

@@Gfysimpletons Oh, are you one of those people who think that Australia's authoritarian? So you know, we do beat America on all democratic indexes I've seen... While I take issue with the way my country handles asylum seekers and the fact that antivaxxers are free to just spread disease, the very same issues exist, usually worse, in the United States. I don't know where you get your information, but they just MIGHT be unreliable...

@Gfysimpletons

2 жыл бұрын

@@briannem.6787 I can not take anybody seriously when they talk about anti-vaxxers……clown!

@Gfysimpletons

2 жыл бұрын

@@RN__4 are you blind? Or just dumb? Either way, vax away!!!!!

Grain elevators used have car tippers that would used to unload boxcars hauling bulk grain.

What a terrific museum and spokesperson. Thanks for a really great video!

So thats what these are! I have seen them before at the museum and wondered what they were. now I know!

Certainly a brilliant idea on paper. top marks to Burlington for having the courage to give it a try.

This is a delight. Thanks for sharing this, so that those of us outside of Minnesota can experience it!

I never knew of these Bopper Cars. Now I will attempt to build one for my model railroad. We will see if I can get one done.

This is so cool!! Thanks for the amazing presentation ❤

Great to see the technology (albeit unsuccessful). Nice ending to the video as well. Have a safe and nice day all. CHEERS from AUSTRALIA

Bulk grain and sand like products were sometimes loaded through top hatches into boxcars in the 40s and 50s around here. A man would be lowered in to pack cardboard around the doors before the product was poured in. When unloaded the doors were jacked open and the product drained and shoveled out the sides.

@beeble2003

2 жыл бұрын

Bulk grain was almost always carried in box cars. It wasn't until the 1980s that the last of it moved to hoppers.

@HavelockYard

2 жыл бұрын

@@beeble2003 Thanks! I didn't know it had continued that late.

@edletain385

2 жыл бұрын

Top hatches in box cars were tried for some commodities but hardly any box cars were built with them. Grain was shipped in ordinary boxcars with wood 'grain doors' installed in the openings, the process of installing them was called 'coopering'. the wood doors were marked with the owning railroads reporting marks ( NP for Northern Pacific, GN for Great Northern, MILW for Milwaukee Road, SOO for Soo Line etc.) They were collected at the terminal elevators like Duluth and shipped back to elevators across that railroad's lines after cars were unloaded. Later they made prefab cardboard grain doors which were just one time use and discarded after use. Some terminal elevators had a system that tipped the car back and forth to empty them but men with shovels still had to remove the remaining grain. Other granular product were shipped in covered hoppers at a much earlier date than grain, late 1930s and early 1940s.

@duncanclarke5830

2 жыл бұрын

My dad had a feed mill in Buffalo called Verity Mills. My sister and brothers and I used to play in the plant and the box cars in the 50’s and early 60’s. I remember the cardboard lining stapled to the inside of the cars. I always liked the smell of dry distillers grain or “brewers slop” as the men called it. My dad’s employees hand stacked feed sacks in the departing cars and pushed the grain out with a scoop built onto a hand truck. Don’t believe they ever went to a gym after work.

@beeble2003

2 жыл бұрын

@@duncanclarke5830 Then they must've gone to the gym before work! You need a lot of muscle of a job like that. 😂

That was a great as well as informative video. Thanks!

I'm enjoying your informative videos. I'm glad this channel was recommended to me.

Well a similar thing is happening with ordinary shipping containers. There is a coffee roastery in my hometown that takes in coffee beans that comes in a ordinary shipping container that has a been fitted with a special inside liner. When the container arrives at the factory on a special trailer that has hydraulics for tipping the whole container in to the loading dock. :)

Walking floor trailers are very useful, but also complex and heavy.

@lakesnake2005

2 жыл бұрын

They NEVER work correctly and clog with product. Retractable rollerbeds work much better as a switchable product hauler. Haul aircargo modules and bulk freight. Used to switch back and forth hauling Concert Production and aircargo depending on the season. Both pay SO MUCH more than dry box freight.

Probably got inspiration from shipping grain in boxcars. Originally grain was shipped in boxcars. One would put something to create a dam(using wood slats at first, then cardboard later) over the lower half to 3/4 of the door opening. Then pour the grain into the boxcar. At the receiving end punch a whole in the bottom of the dam and most of the grain would spill out. Then a crew would sweep the remaining grain out. There were many problems with this, and most of the cure was the 100 ton grain hopper.

@EL300B

2 жыл бұрын

I can remember seeing box cars loaded like that years ago.never knew how they unloaded them.

Having just retired from working for the BNSF for over twenty years this sounds like one of their knuckle head ideas… Like a lot of others!

Two observations: "Bopper" car sounds better than "Hoxcar" would have. Paper is so heavy for its bulk (whether base stock or finished rolls), I find it hard to imagine it riding on the floors of these cars without damage to the floors and the load.

All of these are great. thank you

The BN experiment was the second go at this type of car. Back in the 1970s, BCOL had the idea and had one car built. The car was passed to CN who didn't like it and the car was passed down the MILW. One car, failed three times. The BCOL car "looked" like an ordinary hopper car with a boxcar door on the side, giving it a funny overall look. The photos/article I saw never got into how the floor worked past that there was one and it somehow folded.

Lovely story about the convention! 😀 👍

You guys have an incredible railroad museum. And from what I've seen from your videos, possibly one of the biggest and best in world! When are you going to reopen?

@chouseification

2 жыл бұрын

They really do - especially when you count the Baldwin 2-8-8-4 Yellowstone engine in the Depot museum, as well as the ones (same model) in Proctor and Two Harbors. Those things are truly amazing and make most railroad gear look tiny in comparison. The one at the Depot is the best, as you get to climb in it and "play with the controls".

As a truck driver in Europe I actually pull a trailer that's a walking floor, you can load up bulk and palet goods it's a great system, I actually think this was a great idea but I can see why it didn't work, great explanation

Interesting video, had no clue. Tip for your videos sound. When you have a lavalier microphone on, don't combine the video cameras boom mic with separate microphone audio like from the lavalier. Otherwise you get this shallow sounding audio, like in this video. When editing it, drop the channel with the boom mic and just have the lavalier mic on both channels on the timeline. (so its not only in one ear) You can still record the boom mic in the field for backup audio in case the lavalier mic has bad audio. Otherwise you get this shallow tin can sounding audio. Like you recorded it inside a can or bucket. FYI

"bumper" cars are old OOS cars that are scheduled for DESTROYING, scrapping. They are put at the end of the Spurs, or siding. Once in a while you have a line the used to go through, but was disconnected and scrapped, leaving the part of the track that is still servicing clients. Just beyond the last customer, there were bump cars If you hit one of those bump cars you went too far It was a safety measure They work well I saw them get hit twice I also saw a bump car pushed over a paved over rail. They still had the track rights There are still 4 cars sitting next to a warehouse and the rails are paved over. I wish I could get a photo of them

QR did the something similar with Gondola cars. Worked really well everything from cement to grain to machinery. Need something kept our of the weather then there is tarps for that. Need to load something off a ramp or platform well the sides come off or fold down. You can top load it and empty off the sides.

Very gosh darn interesting! Never knew about these!

Very informative. Great video

Very nice delivery. 👍🏻

Just because a particular design iteration is deemed a failure doesn’t mean the overall concept is bad. A few tweaks might make it good. Anyway, I can see how having a surplus of certain rolling stock might be advantageous for a RR.

@briannem.6787

2 жыл бұрын

I've heard some people discussing the idea of reviving the Bopper with new technology to assist in increasing local freight traffic (as when local freight exists you can ignore intermodal for some situations and use trains from start to end)

Great stuff. Thanks!

Interesting, thanks for sharing

Jack of all trades, master of none.

This was not a new idea, it was first tried in the 1890s with wooden truss rod cars, didn't work then either. In the late 1960s National Steel Car in Canada built two prototype cars for the railroads to try, one with larger capacity than the other. The car floors were a grate rather than any moveable floor for the grain to flow through to the unloading hoppers, CN tried one and CP the other, neither were deemed satisfactory and eventually had their box car doors welded shut and sold to BC Rail as covered hoppers. I have several photos of the CN one. It was in a special NSC green and white paint job with CN reporting marks.

Boxcars we're used for grain for more than a century.

Thank you very much for the awesome viedo the knowledge is powerful thank you railroad fan

Great story, great video! Greetings from Ulm, Germany to Duluth.

So I guess bopper cars worked out about as well as aviation battleships. At least they didn't sap away valuable resources.

In the grain example, the fleet utilization is much worse than that! I was living in New Mexico during the BNSF merger, along a Santa Fe track. One of the immediate results of the merger was that the siding by my residence became a parking lot for Burlington Northern covered hoppers during the winter.

You KNOW what I LIKE!

Well..... they are cool looking.

Today I learned that "bopper" cars exist. Interesting!

Didn't the Denver and Rio Grande Western have something like this? I remember seeing pictures of wooden boxcars that had lettering on the sides that said Grain.

@beeble2003

2 жыл бұрын

Grain used to be carried in box cars. They'd put boards over the bottom three-quarters of the doors and some even had hatches in the roof for loading. Unloading would be by removing the boards and using shovels once the grain stopped flowing. It wasn't until the early 1980s that the last grain box cars went out of service.

How ironic that. The final message hasn’t worked out either lol

Funny. I work for a company that bought tractor trailers with walking floors. Yet you could cover walking floor and use it as a normal trailor. Well that never worked for us either.

This is really cool, because I do not remember these cars from the 1980s

I want one. Please build more.

In the 1950s during a shortage of covered hoppers, the railroads contrived a way to seal boxcar doors with wooden planks. Boxcars could be loaded through the mostly closed doors with conveyors and filled with grain. Unloading required a lot of men with scoop shovels. Once the end of harvest shipments were completed, the car could return to conventional service by removing the planks from the doorway. I suspect the large amount of manual labor weighed against this practice. America was still able to manufacture steel rail cars back in those days.

@beeble2003

2 жыл бұрын

That wasn't contrivance due to a shortage. Grain always used to be shipped that way in box cars. It wasn't until the 1980s that hoppers completely took over. Some box cars even had hatches in the roof for top-loading grain.

@nicholaschard7143

2 жыл бұрын

During the grain car shortage in the early 1980's I remember seeing the old ice reefer cars being used in grain service and equipped with wood planks at the door openings.

Another idea that works better on paper than in practice.

I think Canada did it better with there grain boxcars. Basically they were regular box cars but they would put a piece of wood on the inside of the door and when they unloaded the cars they tipped them to the side a little with a special machine.

Instead of shaking floors they should have tried hydraulically sloping floors and a power supply that works from plant 240 or 480 power.

@NorthShoreScenicRailroadDuluth

2 жыл бұрын

Great idea!

Milwaukee Road tried it with BC Rail as well.

Didn't the Milwaukee Road do that too? Or something similar?

It sounds like the issue wasn’t even the actual concept of the cars that was the issue, just some technical limitations and unreliability in this specific model. I bet, if given some more time and development the concept could’ve been successful. Specifically finding a way to get rid of the internal hydraulic system. My idea (and im not an expert by any means) would be to instead have the power that lifts the floor to be external at the industry that you would basically just plug into the car to switch between. Either as an electrical supply cable or a mechanical linkage.

@cpufreak101

2 жыл бұрын

my thinking was, there's already air there from the air brake system. perhaps the floor can just be a permanent grate with a pneumatic system to shake whatever remaining grain there is free.

@beeble2003

2 жыл бұрын

You can't assume that an industry that ships in box cars will have anything more than a loading bay and a forklift. If you tell them to install special equipment to convert your weird-ass box cars into actual box cars, they'll tell you to send them a proper box car. If you try to insist, they'll call the local trucking company and they won't come back.

Similer style cars are used in Brazil.

That hopper isn’t that old, and it looks beat to hell!

Any o scale models of these units?

I feel like all you need is a white stetson with a turquoise band

Surely there's a way to do this, maybe it was just a half baked implementation.

Now I want a bopper car. Rats.

You need a couple of those stupid Road Railer cars that were supposed to be hauled by trucks as well as trains and you will have a complete set of worthless box cars. Could those be considered "Big Bopper" box cars ? And how would Buddy Holly feel about it ?

Speaking of hopper cars, why do some have curved sidewalls, while the rest have straight sidewalls?

It doesn’t sound all that crazy, if I was management I would have given them a go.

For total utilization... containerization.. if all you have is well cars with transload without handling. Then u have the best capital utilization. Cars show up and leave when they have a container in them. You then need to build commodity type containers. But seeing as the trucking industry has a similar problem with trailers. This could be a collaberation to further the means. And once this is standard. You can then because u pnly use one type of rail car, you can stard to increase speeds. Build better faster well cars.

@beeble2003

2 жыл бұрын

If you containerize everything, you just switch the resource utilization problem to the containers instead of the rail cars. There's nothing inherent to well cars that makes them fast, so whatever technology you use in your better, faster well car could just as well be applied to make a better, faster grain hopper or any ther kind of car.

@kibashisiyoto6771

2 жыл бұрын

Ever seen a train of empty well cars being repositioned? That's not great asset utilization. Also, boxcars can handle 3-4 truckload equivalents, a well car can only handle 2 truckload equivalents. There's a lot of tradeoffs involved.

@beeble2003

2 жыл бұрын

@@kibashisiyoto6771 "Ever seen a train of empty well cars being repositioned? That's not great asset utilization." Everything needs to be repositioned sometimes. The point about well cars is that, overall, they have much better utilization. Grain hoppers are empty literally half the time while they're being used, and often spend several months of the year in storage. Well cars run loaded in both directions, most of the time, except where there are extremely asymmetric traffic flows, such as major import ports like LA/Long Beach. The real problem is that the utilization of well cars is essentially fake, as they spend a lot of time carrying empty containers around. In other words, the utilization of the car is great, but the containers less so. In principle, one could move all grain transport into "hopper containers" carried on well cars. The well cars would have near-100% utilization, but the hopper containers would have exactly the same low utilization as hopper cars do. Essentially, this is the same accounting trick that could be pulled by saying that the underframes of grain hoppers have 100% utilization (they're always carrying something!) but the hopper body doesn't (it's empty half the time).

just found this channel

@NorthShoreScenicRailroadDuluth

2 жыл бұрын

So glad you found it! Hope you watch more.

The Warriors had Boppers……..

Why did they not just have normal hopper chutes?

They were made by Bethlehem Steel… out of aluminum. That’s a way to support your main product…

Bopper car: The car that ignores crossing signals and get sent into next week by a loco.

In the 80's a bopper car was also known as a car full of valley girls on their way to the club. Another 80's fun fact is being flatulent was known as "floating an air biscuit." Thank you for sharing these very interesting videos for someone that's mobility impaired. The 80's term for that isn't very PC so I'll leave that to everyone's imagination. I will be looking into joining as I really want that guide and I'm glad to support a great cause like this.

Would be nice to have these in HO

Didn't CP use old 40' boxcars in dual grain/freight service back in the 60s and 70s?

@beeble2003

2 жыл бұрын

All railroads used box cars to carry grain. Grain hoppers didn't come into service until after WWII and they didn't completely take over until the early 1980s. That massive fleet of cylindrical Canadian grain hoppers wasn't replacing earlier hoppers -- it was replacing box cars.

@mshum538

2 жыл бұрын

Southern introduced the grain hopper in the early sixties ( 60d’s ) the 100 ton was often referred to as a “swinging sway”…… Magor Car Company….

Alright...how many times did dude fuss with his combover? 86 times....

Wow I've never seen nor heard of a bopper car.

Take a shot whenever he finger combs his hair

There wasn't one design engineer that asked why the hell the floor needs to shake? Seems to me that simply rotating the floor slats would have done the trick.

@Engine1988

Ай бұрын

Oh, but that's what design engineers tend to be real good at, in my experience!

yo i wear my museum pass clip thingy on my hat all the time

Should have made them air powered to start with. Even if it was an air over hydraulic system.

So explain to me WHY WERE THESE CARS A FAILURE?????

@lachlanlandreth9069

2 жыл бұрын

They were not implemented well enough. Mechanical failures mainly. The customer having to clean them out in the "Papermill" example, where a hopper product comes in, boxcar commodity out would also not be ideal. Better manufacturing, power packs on each car may make this idea better.

Would you buy a used bopper from this guy? Probably

Here's a good idea to make those floors move. Ahem. MAKE THEM PNEUMATIC! You already have a supply of air going back down the train

@beeble2003

2 жыл бұрын

99% of the time, if you can think of an "obvious" improvement like this to a company's procedures, they already thought of it and rejected it because they know it doesn't work. Brake air is used as a pneumatic power source in some rail cars: the Diffco side-dumping ballast hoppers, for example. You can be sure that BN woud have used it if it was plausible. My guess would be that there's a limited amount of air available and that building a high-powered pneumatic system of a 90psi air supply requires very large cylinders that require a lot of air and operate slowly.

Should have named them Flopper cars.

If the manufacturer made them correctly they wouldn't be able to sell both the hopper and the boxcar which would mean them losing millions of dollars but hey, thats just business. 🤷‍♂️