How would a small hole or rust spot in a steel box car side be repaired in the 1930s or '40s?  Today, I know they would weld a patch onto the surface, or if the metal is too thin, glue it on.  Would a 12" square (or so) patch be welded on in those days?  Riveted? 

I am building a couple box cars and I need to repair a couple spots low down on the sides.  Before I break out the putty, I thought maybe I'd see if I could use a simpler and more charismatic patch.

I am starting operations in my small switching layout and I have some questions. 

My Csx local train spots and pull cars from a small industry yard, 2 tracks,  near a cement plant. This small industry yard has 2 functions, storage and runaround track. A bit later a Csx switcher takes these cars to the cement plant and return with loads and some empties to the industry yard.

The sugar beet industries used a lot of raw materials in the sugar extraction process. Two big commodities were limestone and coke.  I know what limestone looks like but I'm not sure how to model coke (no, not the soda pop). I need to make loads for hopper cars and create piles of it around the beet factories.

The prototype Great Western Railway had a large number of drop bottom gondolas for hauling sugar beets. They started with 150 small wooden gondolas in the early 1900s and increased their capacity with wooden racks on the top edges.  In 1949, the GWR started buying used steel drop bottom gondolas to replace the wooden ones and eventually had a fleet of 188 units.  All were sold for scrap starting in 1979 when trucks became the predominate method of hauling beets.