My 50-foot automobile car, Part 3

Last year, I showed the starting steps in a project to add a 50-foot Viking roof to an automobile car body to model a Chicago & North Western prototype (see it at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2025/06/a-simple-freight-car-kitbash.html ). 

I had on hand a pair of Cannonball Car Shops original Dreadnaught ends which I could apply to match the C&NW prototype. Shortening those ends and applying them to a Branchline 50-foot body was shown in a second post (it is here: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2025/08/freight-car-kitbash-part-2.html ). But at about that time, I discovered I already possessed such a C&NW car, that I inherited. This led to some head-scratching. What other road would have had Viking-roofed 50-foot auto cars?

The one that came to mind was the Erie, another road that evidently liked the Viking roof, so I contacted eminent Erie modeler Schuyler Larrabee to ask about prototypes. It took him a while to dig into the question, but he came back to me with the information that, yes, Erie did have some cars like that. In fact, not only is a builder photo in the 1940 Car Builders Cyclopedia (page 147) but so are the plans, confirming the Viking roof and also showing that the ends were Hutchins — and not just Hutchins, but inverse Hutchins. 

Originally these were Erie 68200–28299. Here is the Cyc photo; doors appear black on the as-delivered car.  In later repaints, the black doors were not continued, and I want to model the car in post-1947 paint, with the 6-foot Erie diamond emblem.

Turns out that Chad Boas has now produced an inverse Hutchins end, so that should enable me to convert my kitbash into an Erie automobile car. I ordered a pair, and they are shown below as I received them. They don’t have a top section, making them usable for both round-roof and peaked-roof cars, with the modeler making a top section from strip or sheet styrene to suit the model.

Previously I had applied Dreadnaught ends to my model, as described earlier, so my first step was to remove those ends. There I discovered yet another advantage of canopy glue, the adhesive used to attach the previous ends: since it doesn’t attack or bond with the styrene car body, it can be peeled off from the interface (for more about canopy glue, see: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2013/05/a-few-words-in-praise-of-canopy-glue.html ). 

Then I used Evergreen styrene strip, 6 scale inches thick, to make top sections by cutting and filing to fit. Once those strips were made, and ends cleaned up, they could be attached, once again with canopy glue. A rubber band made sure ends remained in correct alignment as the glue sets. Here the recessed panels in the inverse Hutchins end are evident.

Next I repeated the step of adding ladders to the car body, and returned to my extensive stash of freight car parts, much of it inherited from Richard Hendrickson. For this car, I chose some old Front Range ladders with the right width, which happened to be molded in orange, and attached them with canopy glue: 

Next steps include addition of grab irons, sill steps, and B-end brake gear. I might mention that the car kit that is the foundation for this project is a Branchline, now some years old, and most of the detail parts in the kit are now so brittle that they can’t even be removed from the sprues by a sprue cutter without breaking them. Other parts are being substituted. I will return to detailing steps in a future post.

Tony Thompson 

Another passenger car upgrade

As I have written a number of times, my layout is primarily a branch line, with limited amounts of mainline traffic passing by on the Southern Pacific’s Coast Division main line. Since my staging cannot accommodate full-length passenger trains, I usually run second sections, or deadhead extras, to include passenger cars.  

My equipment is in some cases accurately modeled SP prototypes (as a single example, see: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2023/03/modeling-sp-passenger-cars-part-12.html , or refer to my Model Railroad Hobbyist article in the issue for October 2023), but in other cases would be better described as credible stand-ins. This is especially appropriate in a deadhead extras, moving equipment from one terminal to another, as in such cases the equipment need not match any specific train. 

This post is about upgrading one such car, a Rivarossi baggage-postal car. This is only broadly like an SP car of the same type, but could pass muster in one of my deadhead extras. The model does resemble some 1950s cars built by Pullman -Standard, such as SP Class 80-BP-60-1 (meaning baggage-postal, 60-foot postal apartment). Shown below is the “north” side of one of these cars, painted for assignment to the City of San Francisco (Pullman photo, CSRM). Note the full-width diaphragms and full skirting.

 I point out that this is the “north” side because the other side was different, with five windows in the postal apartment. Below is a photo of the “south” side, seen in COSF service at Laramie, Wyo. in August 1966 (Don Munger collection). Here skirts are almost all removed, and full-width diaphragms are gone Both prototype photos are from the essential  SPH&TS book, Southern Pacific Passenger Cars, Vol. 3: Head-end Equipment (Pasadena, 2007).

The Rivarossi car has all these general features, so I decided I could use it, even though it’s 73 feet long, not 80 feet. I began by stripping its original paint, masking and painting two-tone gray in the typical SP “pool scheme” arrangement of the mid-1950s, that is, with no train name or emblem, and lettering it with postal-baggage SP decals. 

The car number I chose to use is SP 5156. This corresponds to SP Class 70-BP-1-3, built by Standard Steel Car in 1924, a round-roof car class fairly different from the Rivarossi model. But many cars in this class were converted to regular baggage cars after World War II, including 5156, so by my modeling year of 1953, 5156 was a non-existent SP 5000-series number. My stand-in model, shown below, could use it.

Evident in this photo is that the model needed replacement of the Rivarossi horn-hook coupler arrangement, which is a kind of “Talgo” attachment to the truck. I will install Kadee couplers on the body instead. It also should have diaphragms, and like all stock Rivarossi passenger cars, has far too little weight for dependable operation. I added a pair of 5/8-11 steel nuts with canopy glue; these can be seen below before painting them black. This is the “north” side of the car.  

Next, diaphragms need to be added, and couplers installed. That and a few other tweaks will be covered in a future post.

Tony Thompson 

Western Pacific’s famous “Feather” box cars

Among the most famous box car paint schemes of the transition era was Western Pacific’s silver scheme with a full-length orange feather (for many years, WP publicized its “Feather River Route” slogan in various ways). I have no idea how many model versions of these silver “feather” cars have been produced, in all scales and on a wide variety of non-prototypical box cars, but it is surely in the tens of thousands. 

The famous silver-feather cars were actually only 20 in number at the beginning, the first 20 of 1951’s 600-car order of PS-1 40-foot box cars from Pullman-Standard, WP 20801–21400. They were an experimental application of the then-new P-S “Compartmentizer” load-divider system. WP’s customers included a number of shippers of canned goods, a product notorious for generating claims for denting and other damage in transit. The load divider was intended to mitigate that problem.

Soon after delivery, WP decided to number its 20 compartmentizer cars separately as WP 19501–19520. The load dividers were an immediate hit with shippers, and soon WP sent 22 more of its new PS-1s back to Pullman-Standard to be equipped with compartmentizers. When so equipped, those 22 cars were reneumbered to 19521–19542. Here’s WP 19527 at Council Bluffs, Iowa in January 1954 (Lou Schmitz photo). 

What may be hard to recognize in this photo is an indication that WP was already having problems with the silver paint scheme, as the paint didn’t adhere well to the car cement coating on the roof and ends. When the second group of 22 cars was repainted into the silver scheme, as you see above, the roof and ends were painted black.

There is a fascinating account available on-line, of the early days of using load-divider cars to ship canned goods. It is a 1954 MBA thesis by Burnis J. Sharp at Boston University. Here is a link to the PDF:  https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/142051966.pdf . Part of the document contains Sharp’s comparison of performance of GAEX DF loader cars, with the Pullman-Standard “Compartmentizer” equipment, as installed in the Western Pacific “Feather” box cars. (My post about the GAEX cars is at this link: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2021/02/the-gaex-box-cars.html .)

Back in the 1990s, I wrote an article for Railroad Model Craftsman magazine about modeling the 1951 order of WP’s PS-1 box cars (September 1994, pp. 56–59). I did do one silver car, but also did a boxcar-red car representing the other 580 cars of the 600-car 1951 order. Third, I wanted to model the WP scheme which replaced the silver scheme, which had been found to show dirt much too well: the “small feather” scheme on a boxcar-red body but keeping the “Rides Like a Feather” slogan (I’ll show it below).

For modeling, more fully described in the RMC article, I used the McKean PS-1 model, as it was the best PS-1 car body available at the time, having correct P-S ends, sill steps, and almost the right P-S roof. I replaced the kit’s 6-foot door with a correct 7-foot door from C&BT Shops, and applied Overland Models etched-metal running boards. Microscale Decals supplied the large-feather and plain schemes, and Champ Decals the small-feather scheme. I also included a bibliography of prototype information in the article.

Here’s the original silver scheme, though without the correct Chrysler FR-5 trucks.

The “small feather’ scheme that followed is colorful too and I enjoy operating this car on my layout, often in canned-goods service.

Then there is the plain scheme with silver lettering, worn, after all, by the great majority of this car group. 

Lastly, let me show one of the many “foobie” versions, applied to practically every imaginable steel box car body: Athearn’s metal car kit with pre-war Dreadnaught ends, conventional straight-panel roof, and six-foot door (and black ladders).’Nuff said.

These schemes are part of freight car history, especially for the western U.S., so they are fun to have in the fleet, and of course to include in layout operating sessions.

Tony Thompson 

Route Cards, Part 32: more examples

I have once again been favored with access to the Michael Litant collection of route cards, most retrieved from freight cars in service in the mid- to late 1960s. As I’ve said before, the variety of formats, shapes and sizes remains interesting, and can serve as guidance for those of us trying to reproduce the look of these in model railroad operations. 

As the title of today’s post suggests, this is just the latest in long series of posts like this. To find more, you can use “route cards” as the search term in the search box at right, or perhaps begin with a typical previous post like this one, which is at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2023/08/route-cards-part-21-more-examples.html . 

I’ll begin with what is probably just a destination card, used in freight yards everywhere. It’s from the Houton Belt & Terminal. Probably the “SL” is a zone, and 477 is the destination (or perhaps an interchange yard). The car, SP 214336, was from Class B-50-38, built in 1956 at Sacramento, a 50-foot double-door box car. The original card is 3 x 4.5 inches, a common vertical format. 

A second example is a Missouri Pacific card, applied at North Little Rock and destined to Van Buren, Arkansas, probably destination 16. It’s not noted whether the car is loaded or empty. The car, N&W 385323, is a conventional 40-foot steel box car with a six-foot side door. Original dimension of the card are 5 x 3 inches. 

Third in this group is what’s called a transfer card, from one railroad to another, in this case from the Milwaukee Road to the Union Pacific. The car is UP 166458, a 50-foot double-door box car with cushion underframe. The car’s cargo is bags, perhaps paper, burlap or other, destined to Houston, Texas on July 3, 1965. The card is 3 x 4 inches. 

My fourth example  is another transfer card, this one from the Chicago & Eastern Illinois to the Indiana Harbor Belt, the car being URTX 1896, a 40-foot ice refrigerator car of general-service class RS. Marking the contents as “X” may mean it was empty. The card is 4 x 3 inches, and like the one shown above, makes very clear the identity of the destination railroad.  

Next is another vertical-format card, this one from the N&W, for car HERX 2141, evidently being moved to Detroit. The HERX reporting mark was owned by North American Car Corp., used for “bunkerless” refrigerator cars, Class RB, essentially insulated box cars. HERX 2141 was 46 feet long.  The card is 3 x 5 inches. 

My final example is from the Kentucky & Indiana Terminal Railroad, and it’s a card for a specific destination, the Reynolds Metal Plant no. 3 at Louisville, Kentucky, The car is B&O 299128, a loader-equipped 55-foot box car with 8-foot doors. The card is 4 x 3 inches.

To me, all these cards are not only interesting in their own right, but give us ideas for what our model route cards could look like. Even in HO scale, some of the very large initials or numbers on some of these cards could be visible in a scale route card.

Tony Thompson 

Seasonality in reefer usage

On my layout, I have chosen to model all of 1953, in that each operating session is on the current month and day, but in 1953. So an April 13 session this year would be modeled as April 13, 1953, and a session this fall on September 15 would be September 15, 1953. One reason for this is so that I can mirror the varying crops being harvested; the area I model was in peak harvest for least one crop in every month of the year.

I have shown this crop seasonality before (see, for example, in this post: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2015/09/seasonality-of-crops-and-traffic.html ), but below is the vegetable crop chart for my modeled area, taken from the multi-page chart in the back of the PFE book (Pacific Fruit Express, 2nd edition, Signature Press, 2000), pages 442–447.  You can click on the image to enlarge it if you wish. Black bars are peak harvests, gray bars off-peak harvesting.

But today’s post is not about accuracy of crops loaded, which in any case only shows up on the waybill. Instead, it is about the cars into which the crops were loaded. At the time I model, PFE had by far the largest reefer fleet in North America, around 40,000 cars. During most of the year, this fleet could handle all of the reefer needs of PFE’s two parent companies, SP and UP, and contract partner WP.

But during peak harvesting in SP, WP and UP territory, July to late September, even PFE’s fleet was inadequate. The table on page 450 in the PFE book shows this by year for virtually all of PFE’s history. In 1953, for example, PFE cars handled 73 percent of that year’s 307,000 perishable shipments in SP territory. 

To solve that problem, PFE borrowed from various other reefer fleets, heavily from American Refrigerator Transport (ART), but also from Fruit Growers Express, the BAR, and others. I’ve discussed this in more detail previously (see this post: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2019/08/foreign-reefers-in-pfe-territory.html ).

So whenever I host an operating session in the July–October period, you will see various foreign reefers being loaded at packing houses on my layout. Of course PFE cars are still the majority in that period, but the foreign cars seen then for loading are rare outside that peak harvest season. Below is a peak-season example, a loaded BAR reefer being picked up at Phelan & Taylor Produce in East Shumala on my layout.

There are other details in seasonal reefer visibility. In late February, through the end of March, strawberries are a sufficiently valuable crop to demand express reefers, and indeed such cars do show up at my Guadalupe Fruit Company for loading in that period. Shown below is an example, with 40-foot PFE Class BR-40-10 no. 909 (an upgraded InterMountain model) at left, and 50-foot Railway Express reefer REX 1227 (a Walthers wood-sheathed model) at right, both spotted for loading. The Ballard depot is behind them.

These cars are normally picked by mainline (non-streamlined) passenger trains at Shumala, and are iced before departure. In the photo below, PFE 928 (with correct Symington-Gould “XL” trucks for PFE 926–950 cars of Class BR-40-10) is being spotted by SP Alco switcher no. 1474 at the ice deck in Shumala, prior to pickup. 

These variations in the reefers that are seen on the layout during operating sessions during particular parts of the year reflect prototype information, and are aspects of layout operation that I enjoy.

Tony Thompson 

Re-trucking

Here I am talking about replacing trucks on freight or passenger cars. Sometimes a car will have been supplied with the “wrong” trucks, say arch-bar when they should have been a newer design; sometimes the sideframes are really not up to snuff appearance-wise; and sometimes they roll, as a friend used to say, “like a rock down a gutter.” Replacing them is what I call re-trucking.  

Some years ago, I posted an example of replacing trucks to get the correct prototypes, on the Red Caboose Southern Pacific HO scale stock cars. The models have very nice bodies, but were delivered with T-section trucks, an SP stock-car application for which I have found no prototype documentation or photograph. Instead, I replaced the Red Caboose truck with the truck SP actually used, the Vulcan, using the Kadee model. (See this earlier post:  https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2015/07/modeling-sp-stock-cars.html .) 

On the passenger side, I have sometimes replaced Rivarossi trucks with Central Valley trucks, with a gain both in car weight and in appearance. I described that as part of my long series on modeling SP passenger cars (for a description, see: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2024/06/modeling-sp-passenger-cars-part-20.html ). 

My second reason for re-trucking, poor appearance, includes such trucks as the snap-in AHM trucks. I showed my method for replacing them in an old post (see it at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2012/03/replacing-snap-in-trucks.html ). The photo below shows the kind of truck I replace immediately: its coupler, snap-in attachment, poor sideframes, and terrible wheelsets all disqualify this truck for operating use.

 A common source of trucks that roll poorly is brass cars. A large proportion of sales of such models is to collectors, who often don’t care, or care much, about rolling quality. In my case, I do want to operate the models, so trucks often get replaced. This topic has come up before, as part of a larger grumble about the shortcomings of many brass cars (that post is here: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2022/08/grumbling-again-about-brass-freight-cars.html ).

I don’t want to single out any particular importer or manufacturer of brass models, and the following example is just one recently encountered. I have a number of Challenger brass models of SP and PFE cars, and most roll just fine. But one of them, a model of Class R-40-26, is very much an exception. I had already had to replace all the side lettering (for why, see: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2013/05/correcting-brass-model-of-pfe-car.html ).

Fiddling with the trucks didn’t result in any improvement. Most of the prototype PFE class had American Steel Foundries A-3 “Ride Control” trucks. These were the best-selling freight trucks after World War II and many manufacturers have produced them in HO scale. I chose a pair of such trucks from my stash.

To prepare the Challenger reefer, I drilled out the metric screw holes with a no. 50 drill, tapped 2-56, and attached new HO trucks with short 2-56 brass screws. These gave a stable rolling performance and were at the correct height for the Kadee couplers already installed.

I will look forward to seeing this car in service on the layout again, now that it has been successfully re-trucked. I regret the necessity of doing so, but it’s a job that unfortunately is all too familiar with brass HO rolling stock 

Tony Thompson 

Waybills, Part 129: Reading a waybill

I know, waybills aren’t most people’s idea of reading material. What I mean is the way one deciphers information, that is, “reads,” a waybill. I know this comes up on a number of layouts which use prototypical waybills  in layout operation.

First, it’s useful to understand what is on a prototype waybill, even though most model railroad versions are simplified from the prototype, often considerably so. But of course the goal in such simplification is to retain essentials. So I’ll begin with a prototype example, which happens to be from the Long Island Railroad. You can click on the image to enlarge if you wish.

I tell people to start at the upper left corner.  Shown there is the identity of the car that is carrying the load: Southern Railway no. 262825, a 40-foot steel boxcar of 40-ton capacity. 

Next, in the area just below the car identity, are shown, at left, the destination place, and on the right, the place of origin. In fact, this division down the center of the document separates information about the shipper and consignee all the way down to the load information. Here the load is going from Bushwick, New York to Ellenburgh, New York. Bushwick is a neighborhood in the northern part of Brooklyn (New York City), and an industrial area at the time of this 1954 waybill. Ellenburg (as now spelled) is in extreme northern New York state, west of Lake Champlain and near the Canadian border.

On a model railroad, you might be modeling either of these places, making the load either inbound or  outbound; or it may be a car in a mainline train, en route between the two.

The next lines below the origin and destination line contains both the routing between the two places, and the names of the shipper and consignee. The Long Island will transfer the car to the New York Central, which in turn will hand off to the Rutland for delivery. Also shown is the shipper, Farmers Grain Co., and the consignee, Carpenter & Adams. At right note the faint image of a weight agreement stamp.

Finally, the load is shown (400 bags of spent brewer's grain, probably from making beer), along with the weight of the load (40,400 pounds) and the charges, which were probably checked by two different clerks, since the pencil check marks are different colors. Also noted is “SL&C,” which stands for “shipper load and count,” meaning that the weight agreement shown by the stamp identifies the expected weight of a bag of spent grain. That means it’s only necessary to count the bags, and multiply by the standard weight, to know the weight of the load.

Each of these elements can be included in a model railroad waybill. Here’s an example from my layout, a load moving in a quite different part of the country, but with the same elements described above being present, including the SL&C notation and a weight agreement stamp.

Waybills need not be complicated to use in model operation, and once familiar, are easy to understand.  I hope this example of “reading” a waybill is helpful.

Tony Thompson