Recently I reported on two of the new 1937 AAR-design box cars in HO scale, both of them Canadian cars, as it happened (you can view that post at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2026/08/rapdios-new-1937-aar-box-cars.html ). Today I want to report on two others.
But first I have to mention the magisterial volume with phenomenal coverage of the 1937 cars, Patrick C. Wider’s monumental 384-page opus, Railway Prototype Cyclopedia, Volume 35 (Silverlake Images, 2020). I am overwhelmed every time I open it. If you’re a “freight car guy” and you don’t have it, your library is quite incomplete.
The first of the 1937 cars I want to present is an Erie car. The photo below shows the first car in an order for 200, Erie 79000–70199, built by Pullman-Standard in February 1940. It has a Viking corrugated roof, Youngstown doors, Ajax hand brake, steel grid running board, and Dreadnaught ends (Pullman photo, Biernacki collection).
The model faithfully reproduces the paint scheme, including the black roof, ends, and door. The running board is shown as unpainted. Soon after the built date of this car, Erie abandoned painting doors black, but naturally some cars so painted survived in service for years. That will be my challenge with this model, to be well-weathered original paint 13 years later, in my modeling year of 1953.
The second car on today’s agenda is a Southern Pacific version. Like several major railroads, as soon as the AAR committee’s design features were pretty much settled in 1936, SP ordered 1750 cars from four builders, and a year later went back for 1000 more. So the “1937” design is important to the SP fleet.
Of that initial order, 500 cars (SP 32770–33269, Class B-50-18) were built by Pullman-Standard, with an example shown below (Pullman-Standard photo). The first. 350 cars of this order had Ureco handbrakes.
Note that the initials SP here, with no periods. SP had discontinued the use of periods in reporting marks in 1931. An end view of another car of this class, at left below (Pressed Steel Car Co.), shows the five-spoke Ureco brake wheel also used on 350 of the Pullman-Standard cars. You can click on the image to enlarge it.
The model I received didn’t have this handbrake attached, but in the box was a small plastic envelope with two different handbrake assemblies, one of which was the five-spoke Ureco (at right above). I have heard some grumbles that handbrakes are not correct on some Rapido 1937 box cars; I hope these people still have the original box so they can search for such an envelope. I will replace the as-delivered handbrake with the correct Ureco.
These models have some nice details not usually included from the factory, such as a service stencil on the brake reservoir. I show an example below.
Below is the Rapido SP model. Like many and possibly all the cars of Class B-50-18, it has a black roof. But the lettering (spelled-out road name) was introduced in 1946, and in fact the car has a reweigh date of 1948. I know of no evidence that post-1946 repaints would have retained the black roof, discontinued by that time. I could of course repaint the roof. However, I can mask the road name and capacity data, and heavily weather the rest of the car, to make this a realistic paint scheme.
Both these are nice models, and both require some judicious paint and weathering to be reasonable for my 1953 modeling year. I will return to that in a future post.
Tony Thompson
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