When the railroad’s two new cabooses (#101 and #102) arrived on the McCloud in 1962, they were delivered in person by a vice president of the manufacturer. The vice president went to lunch with Flake Willis, then president of the McCloud River Railroad. Over lunch Mr. Willis complained about the inadequacies of common boxcars for lumber loading purposes and sketched out on a napkin the basic plan for a new type of car that would offer the same load protection characteristics of a boxcar combined with the ease of loading/unloading characteristics of a flatcar. The result was the all-door boxcar.

The all-door boxcar looked like a common boxcar, but the sides of the car consisted of four large doors that could be passed over one another, giving the loader or unloader access to the entire length of the car. The manufacturer was intrigued, and a prototype was built to test the car type out. The car arrived in McCloud for testing, and everyone involved was impressed with the car type. A total of 100 cars were ordered. U.S. Plywood, the railroad’s corporate parent, actually owned the cars, as they could control their movement and use a lot more effectively than the railroad could.

The all-door design pioneered by the McCloud/U.S. Plywood cars were actually the second attempt at creating an all-door boxcar. The Southern Railroad had a series of all-door cars a few years earlier than the McCloud cars came along, but the key difference was that the Southern cars used roll-up doors instead of sliding doors. The roll-up version of the all-door car did not achieve the same level of commercial success as the sliding door version of the car.

The all-door boxcar initially caught on, and many timber companies and railroads throughout the United States and Canada purchased such cars. However, the sliding panels added substantially to the maintenance needs (and expense) of the cars. A general movement in the lumber industry to packaged lumber loads made the use of flatcars practical, and by the late 1970’s most all-door boxcars were withdrawn from service. A few can still be seen operating today, but they are few and far between.

The U.S. Plywood cars eventually became property of the McCloud River Railroad, and in the later part of the 1970’s most of the remaining car were re-built into standard boxcars by the McCloud shops. The two center doors were left in place, but the outside doors were plated over. The cars received full McCloud River paint jobs in the process. McCloud numbered the cars into the 1200- and 1600- series. The cars spent most of their time in storage. Unlike the rest of the McCloud’s boxcar fleet, the former all-door cars were not included in the sale of Itel’s freight car fleet to GE Capital. Instead, the cars were included in the sale to the McCloud Railway Company. The cars received new MCR reporting marks shortly after the sale. The McCloud Railway did not have any real use for the cars, and most of them have been partially scrapped. The bodies were cut off of the frames; the frames have been sold to various parties for use as bridges; and the railroad turned many of the bodies into storage sheds around the property or sold to other parties for use as sheds. At least one boxcar remains intact in the McCloud yard.