Posted on 11/05/2021 11:42:50 AM PDT by nickcarraway
Joaquin Montoya was never into trains – until he discovered he was living in part of one.
"I never really paid attention to trains, you see the Rail Runner and stuff like that, but I never really was into trains," Montoya said.
In July, a fire destroyed most of his home. While he was trying to clean up, he made an usual discovery.
"We went to knock down the whole place to redo it and took off the drywall in here, and I noticed the wood and the steel beams and the trusses in here, it kind of looks like a boxcar," Montoya said.
His house was made up of a boxcar that's more than 100 years old – he found a stamping that dates back to the 1890s. As he began more of the cleanup process, he found pages of the Albuquerque Journal from the 1900s all over the walls.
"Since I've lived here, I knew this house was special," Montoya said. "It took a tragedy to get here, it's like a blessing in disguise."
Montoya said he wants to restore the boxcar in the future but he's still trying to figure that out. His best guess for how the boxcar got turned into a home? He said maybe it got derailed and people just built around it – which was pretty common back then.
Maybe it was part of The Great Train Robbery?.....................
puff
I’ve been living in a train for years . . .
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and didn’t even know it . . .
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puff puff puff
Dude , this is AWESOME weed!
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If that were the case then the wheel carriages would still be intact.
No, somebody either bought or found the boxcar and moved it to the site and put it on a foundation.
“His best guess for how the boxcar got turned into a home?”
Partly because there were no building codes back then. Otherwise it would have been prohibited.
Back then it was assumed that people had common sense.
Some people just south of Retreat built a house around the mobile home they were living in. There is a complete mobile home inside the house. Here it is on Google Maps street view:
A local realtor told me it is not completely unheard of to see a house in parts of Albuquerque that have a rammed earth floor, or adobe brick construction covered by a facade of plaster. People did what they could 100-130 years ago.
And they have remained that long because they are usually passed down within a family. So no inspections were done because there were no mortgages.
this project is off the rails...
Boxcar Willie
September 1, 1931 – April 12, 1999
Born Lecil Travis Martin on Sept. 1, 1931, in Sterrett, Texas
People are building houses out of earth rammed tire walls in Taos, NM. They call them earthships. They’re totally off grid and stay at 70-75 degrees year round with no HVAC system. They all have a full length greenhouse across the front which faces South. That creates their heat. To cool them, there are geothermal tubes on the back of the house that they can open along with high windows in the front which creates cross ventilation.
Adobe, rammed earth etc works well down on the Southwest and in Mexico. Where I am in the Ozarks, not so much. I walked out to my garden one day after a lot of rain and there was a 1 inch hole with water bubbling up out of it and it flowed for days. We have a lot of moss. The North side of our buildings turn green after a few years and that will eventually turn into moss.
Hard to imagine someone not noticing over time what their house was built from.
Years ago, I ate at a restaurant in New Mexico, that was apparently located in a building that had once been owned by Kit Carson (who died in 1868 ;>). So, yes, there are indeed a few old buildings in use, in that part of the world...
People make living spaces out of containers every day. They are nothing but a modern version of a box car.
I have a friend in Maine who has 3 Cabooses, 2 boxcars and a refrigerator car in his backyard. The boxcars has a huge N scale layout 80 by 40 in the boxcars, the Cabooses are his kids fort and the refrigerator car is where his game (deer, elk, rabbit, moose) is kept... The cars is on an half mile of track... He’s looking for a Baldwin sharknose loco or a GE U boat.
There’s only two Sharks left in the world, they’re privately owned, and everybody wants them.
As to the article, repurposing retired railroad cars (freight and passenger alike) into houses and sheds was very common before postwar zoning in the 1950s.
Folks in New Mexico are innovative when it comes to housing. In many places it’s a tough environment. Although Socorro County banned joining 2 singlewides with plywood and liquid nails a few years ago.
I lived in Bakersfield. Merle Haggards home in the Dale started as a boxcar. I also know of another home on a farm where it’s obvious one of the bedrooms is a boxcar. Probably started as the boxcar and then built around it. It’s not that unusual.
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