Gilbert Car Company
rolling stock manufacturer
Gilbert Car Company was a railroad car builder based in Troy, New York. It began manufacturing streetcars in the late 1880s. Gilbert cars were sold and exported worldwide.
Founded by Orsamus Eaton (1792–1872) and Uri Gilbert (1809–1888), the company changed names several times as the partnership changed:
1830 Eaton and Gilbert
1844 Eaton, Gilbert & Co
1862 Uri Gilbert and Son
1864 Gilbert, Bush & Company
1879 Gilbert & Bush Co
1882 Gilbert Car Manufacturing Co
1889 Taylor Electric Truck Company
In 1879, Gilbert leased the Buffalo Car Works facility in Buffalo, which had a capacity of five to twelve new cars per day. The Gilbert company saw some success in 1881 when it secured an order for several hundred refrigerator cars for the newly established American Refrigerator Transit Company. In 1886, Gilbert leased the Jones Car Works of Schenectady.
Following the Panic of 1893, and the death in March 1893 of company president Edward Gilbert, son of Uri Gilbert, the company entered receivership in August 1893. Only a few months earlier, Gilbert had completed construction of a hundred cars for New York Central Railroad passenger trains. Then in 1895, the company stopped building rail cars. Upon closure, the plant value was estimated at $400,000 (equivalent to $15,480,000 in 2025).
The public source identifies “Gilbert Car Company” as rolling stock manufacturer. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Gilbert, Company and rolling.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jan 30, 2022. The linked authority identifier is Q5560836. The Library of Congress control number is sh2009001558. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1792, 1872, 1809 and 1888.
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This entry incorporates text from “Gilbert Car Company” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.