- Ensign Manufacturing Company
Infobox Company
name = Ensign Manufacturing Company
type = private
genre =
foundation = 1872
founder =
location_city = Huntington, WV
location_country =United States
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industry =rail transport
products =freight car s
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intl =Ensign Manufacturing Company, founded as Ensign Car Works in 1872, was a railroad car manufacturing company based in
Huntington, West Virginia . In the 1880s and 1890s Ensign's production of wood freight cars made the company of the three largestsawmill operators in Cabell County. [cite book| url=http://books.google.com/books?id=e4oMAAAAYAAJ&dq=%22ensign+manufacturing+company%22&source=gbs_summary_s&cad=0| title=West Virginia Geological Survey: Cabell, Wayne and Lincoln Counties| author=Krebs, C. E.; Teets, D. D., Jr.; and White, I. C.| publisher=Allied Printing| location=Wheeling, WV| year=1913| page=p 420| ] In 1899, Ensign and twelve other companies were merged to formAmerican Car and Foundry Company .cite web| url=http://www.umsl.edu/barriger/collections/acf.htm| title=The ACF Industries Archival Collection| publisher=John W. Barriger III National Railroad Library| accessdate=2008-04-13| ]History
Ensign Car Works was founded in
Huntington, West Virginia , in 1872 byEly Ensign and William H. Barnum, who managed a car wheel manufacturing company inConnecticut . The company was incorporated onNovember 1 1872 .cite web| url=http://www.midcontinent.org/rollingstock/builders/ensign.htm| title=Ensign Manufacturing Company| publisher=Mid-Continent Railway Museum| date=2006-04-09| accessdate=2008-04-15| ] Financing was provided primarily by Barnum and Collis P. Huntington, who was one of the principals in theCentral Pacific Railroad and after whom the town of Huntington was named. [White, p 142.]For the first ten years of production, Ensign manufactured iron parts such as railroad car wheels. The company began building wooden
freight car s in the early 1880s, selling a large portion of its inventory to the Chesapeake and Ohio, Southern Pacific and Central Pacific railroads, all of which were controlled by Huntington.In 1881,
Ferdinand E. Canda , a proponent of wooden freight car design who had built freight cars in the 1870s inChicago , joined the Ensign Car Works as general manager. [White, p 600.] Canda designed an improved stock car to haul cattle and ordered 1,000 cars of this design from Ensign in 1890; the cars were delivered to theCanda Cattle Car Company . [White, p 261.] Canda then designed an improvement to the drop-bottom gondola which was used incoal service at the time; his design featured a pair of sliding sheet metal doors (as opposed to the more common hinged doors) at the car's center. [cite book| url=http://books.google.com/books?id=2fh0H0USx-0C&dq=%22ensign+manufacturing+company%22&source=gbs_summary_s&cad=0| title=Trains and Technology: The American Railroad in the Nineteenth Century| author=Bianculli, Anthony J.| year=2002| publisher=University of Delaware Press| volume=Vol 2: Cars| isbn=0-87413-730-6| page=p 113| ] A car of this design, built at Ensign, was shown at theWorld's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. [White, p 322.] After the exposition andPanic of 1893 , Ensign Car Works closed for a period of seven months, reopening onJanuary 3 ,1894 . [cite news| url=http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9B06E4DD1F39E033A25757C0A9679C94659ED7CF| title=Many Industries Starting Up| publisher=New York Times| date=1894-01-04 | accessdate=2008-04-15| ]With Huntington's backing, Canda designed a convert|40|ft|sing=on long
boxcar that could carry 50 tons of freight. Canda's design used wood construction despite the fact that steel construction was becoming more common in freight car design at the time. Huntington purchased 2,000 cars for Southern Pacific Railroad following this design. [White, p 202.]After the 1899 merger that formed
American Car and Foundry Company (ACF), Canda stayed on with the former Ensign plant designing and building Central Pacific Railroad's largest wooden-framehopper car s. The car design was similar to CP's large boxcar order from a short time earlier, featuring a 50 ton capacity in a convert|36|ft|sing=on long car, but this car included cast steel bolsters. CP ordered 300 cars of this design. [White, p 347.]Freight car production continued at the former Ensign plant under ACF, with the first all-steel freight car built in the winter of 1905/06. During
World War II , a number of cars were built there to British designs for export. The former Ensign plant continued as a major freight car manufacturing plant through the 1990s, when the plant was used to produce ACF'sCenterflow hopper s.References
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