Instead, I am responding to an interesting question I received by email. It asked, essentially, “when a new freight car comes out, how do you decide if you can use it, and which road name(s)?” This of course touches on the previous posts about overall car fleets, but not directly. So I thought a little about how I have in fact made decisions of this kind. (And I won’t include impulse or “gotta have one” decisions . . .)
I will use as an illustration, the just-out announcement by Rapido Trains that they will be producing an HO scale USRA (United States Railroad Administration) box car, of 40-ton, double-sheathed design. Like the other USRA cars, this car was designed by a high-level committee of experienced railroad mechanical people, and was certainly a successful and durable box car. There were almost 25,000 of them produced, eventually allocated to some 21 railroads and their subsidiaries.
This wide range of prototype owners of the car means it’s a terrific choice for Rapido to produce, and we know they make excellent products. (To see their announcement, you can visit this page: https://www.rapidotrains.com/products/ho-scale/freight-cars/ho-scale-usra-double-sheathed-wood-boxcar .) Of course, the model is hardly a novelty. Good versions of this box car have been available in resin for years from Westerfield and Funaro & Camerlengo, and Accurail makes a quite decent styrene version. Even the much-mocked Ertl styrene USRA box car was a decent starting point for upgrading or redetailing.
But let’s examine the options presented by Rapido. Below is a photo of one of the prototype sample cars, produced in 1918 at the beginning of USRA manufacturing by American Car & Foundry, clearly showing the 5-5-5 corrugated steel end and Andrews trucks, as well as general car appearance (AC&F photo).
Now the question is, can I use one (or more) of the Rapido models? This depends on several factors, in my mind. First, I want to look at the railroads for which Rapido will letter the cars, and see if those are railroads for which I could use additional cars (that goes back to the general car fleet approach mentioned in the first paragraph, top). Second, I want to look at how many USRA 40-ton box cars those railroads received, to see if the number amounts to a credible choice. The Kansas City Southern, for example, only received 100 of these cars, thus statistically not too visible.
And third, this being a World War I-era design, how well did the cars survive on any railroad I would be interested in? An example might be Wabash, which originally got 3000 of these cars, but by 1953, only 54 cars remained. (My modeling year is 1953.) That wouldn’t be a good choice, for the same statistical reason mentioned in connection with KCS.
But where am I getting this information? First, I rely on James E. Lane’s excellent article on all the USRA cars, published in Railroad History (the journal of the Railway and Locomotive Historical Society) in issue 128, back in 1973. You can find this publication used from on-line booksellers. Lane tabulates all the final allocations of each USRA car type, including of course the 40-ton box cars, and the railroad number series for each.
Second, I turn to my copy of the January 1953 issue of the Official Railway Equipment Register or ORER (an NMRA reprint), which is also readily available used. Since Lane provides the number series of the USRA cars on each railroad, one merely has to consult the ORER and see how many were still around by the time I model. As an example, in contrast to my Wabash example above, is the Rock Island, originally the recipient of 2500 cars, and with 773 still in service by 1953.
And third, there is a magisterial article by Pat Wider, published in Railway Prototype Cyclopedia (RPC) volume 16 in 2007, that contains not only roster information but numerous large-format photos of the cars of practically all recipients of these cars. (Incidentally, Mr. Wider followed up with an equally extensive and complete article about the steel rebuilds of these USRA cars in RPC 24.)
It’s logical that the poorer railroads (like Rock Island) would be more likely to hang onto an older box car like this would be in 1953, neither rebuilding it to more modern standards nor scrapping it. Also logical is that any railroad fond of wooden box cars might keep them a long time, too. So Great Northern, originally allocated 1500 cars, still had 1222 of them in service in 1953.
On the other hand, large recipients Santa Fe and Pere Marquette had none of these cars still in service (in original form) after World War II. The Santa Fe, with originally 2700 cars in their class Bx-2, had rebuilt all of the surviving ones into steel-sheathed cars by 1942. Another example would be the St. Louis–San Francisco, the post-WW II survivors of whose 3500-car allocation had also been rebuilt with steel sides.
So my leanings at this point are toward Rock Island, for which I could use another car, and Great Northern, for which I don’t really need more cars, but one would certainly fit.
There’s a third example that is tempting, namely that Rapido will offer two paint schemes of the Toronto, Hamilton and Buffalo (TH&B), which did indeed receive 300 second-hand USRA 40-ton box cars in 1941 from the New York Central (NYC was a half-owner of TH&B). Of the 300 cars, 253 were still listed in the 1953 ORER. The problem there is that Canadian cars seem to have operated in the U.S. in fairly small fractions of their total Canadian fleet size, ten percent in one estimate.
So to sum up, my approach to new freight car offerings is that I would examine any new model on the basis of the railroads (and paint schemes) offered, in terms of my existing car fleet, along with how many of the particular car were still in service on that railroad in my modeling year of 1953. There are ample resources around to make these kinds of determinations, I enjoy using them, and I don’t hesitate to dig into them to help me make decisions.
Tony Thompson
In regard to the TH&B cars, the yellow Tie Cat version was quite rare (only one known example maybe) and was known to be used in local service. The freight car red version was the common type and travelled widely.
ReplyDeleteThanks, appreciate the info. I would have chosen the BCR version anyway, if I ordered one.
ReplyDeleteTony Thompson