Saturday, November 7, 2020

Modeling Pennsy freight cars

The freight car fleet of the Pennsylvania Railroad, throughout its history up to the Penn Central merger in 1968, was the largest in the United States. That’s one reason for a statement often repeated by modelers,  that “if you model freight cars, you model the Pennsy.” They went everywhere and were seen everywhere. I can’t hope to provide a wide view of this immense fleet, but will just endeavor to make a few points that I hope are useful.

I will begin with a comparison of the largest 15 freight car fleets in 1950. In order to offer the most general use, this graph has been drawn by excluding the hopper cars of all the railroads in the graph, on the basis that for modelers of areas far from the PRR or any of these roads, the hopper cars would all but invisible in interchange. (Full disclosure: I model the California coast. Obviously your own mileage may differ.) 

But even with hopper cars omitted, PRR is clearly the largest fleet. Note that PFE, jointly owned by SP and UP but regarded by the ICC as a private owner, shows up here.

The Pennsylvania car fleet was interesting in that it had a very large proportion of gondolas, as many as its box cars, but this post concentrates on the box cars. PRR box cars have an immediate focus: for modelers of any period from the 1920s to the end of the transition era, probably the most important PRR freight car to recognize is the Class X29 box car.

The graph below shows the largest classes of PRR box cars in two years, 1939 and 1955. The total dominance of the X29, with over 29,000 cars originally built, is obvious. Note also the disappearance of the X25 cars and shrinkage of X26, by 1955, along with a new post-war class, X43. But the X29 is clearly the biggest story.

There are a great many complexities to the huge X29 car class, and I will  not endeavor to address them here in any detail. For those interested, there are some superb published sources, which I list below.

G.C. Rauch and R.L. Johnson, The Keystone (PRH&TS magazine), December 1978.

Ted Culotta (“Essential Freight Cars” series, nos. 35 and 36), Railroad Model Craftsman, January,  February 2007.

Patrick C. Wider, Railroad Prototype Cyclopedia, No. 24 (2012).

There were a great many differences in detail during the years of production (1924 to 1934), some quite minor, and I would refer the reader to the sources listed above. But I will illustrate the primary features. The earliest cars had a “car builder” panel door (not a Creco door) with two door stops to the right of the door, and a short upper door track. They also had the signature flat plate end. Built in late 1924 by AC&F (American Car & Foundry), the earliest cars predated the “circle keystone” paint scheme, and had the road name underlined (AC&F photo, courtesy Ed Kaminski).

Later in the 1920s, PRR began to apply corrugated doors to the X29 production, and the two door stops of early cars were replaced by a single stop just above the bottom door track. The upper door track was also extended. Here is an example of this appearance  (AC&F photo, Richard Hendrickson collection). The very last X29 cars built, during 1932 to 1934, had Dreadnaught ends.

Without going into detail, I should mention that practically all combinations of the features just described can be found on X29s that underwent various upgrades or repairs. A common change in later years was the repair of rusted-out side panels at the bottom. The PRR applied what were called “patch panels” to replace the rusted area, frequently along the full car length. The Wilbur C. Whittaker photo below shows this, in a 1953 photo at San Jose, California. (Click on the image to enlarge if you wish.)

Because of their sheer numbers, modelers of almost any North American railroad before 1960 need to include models of X29 box cars in their model fleet. I will turn to modeling issues and opportunities in a following post.

Tony Thompson

10 comments:

  1. I've heard that modeling Pennsy freight cars can damage a person's brain. Is there a way to model the Pennsy without brain damage?

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  2. Hi, Jeff. Jeff knows very well that I sometimes present a clinic entitle "Pennsy Modeling Without Brain Damage," so the question is being asked with tongue firmly in cheek.

    With similarly located tongue, I would answer that the worst brain damage can be evaded if you avoid examination of the side-sheet overlap patterns in X29 box cars.
    Tony Thompson

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  3. Don't forget that a sizeable number of X29s were rebuilt into the later body style of X29B, which do not look like the original X29s.
    Jason Hill

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    1. I know it very well, Jason, and have one of these rebuilt cars in my fleet. But in reference to the previous comment (above), I would point out that the rabbit hole of Pennsy sub-classes is one of the sure routes to brain damage.
      Tony Thompson

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    2. Yup. I agree, the sub-variants are rather crazy on the PRR... and then trying to track all the special assignments which wouldn't have been interchanged freely. Notice, I've not tried to blog anything about X29s yet. Hat's off you good sir, keep up the great posts!
      Jason Hill

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  4. I'd like your thoughts on how the CNR and CPR car fleets would fit into this puzzle. CNR had a huge number of boxcars. On railroads like the CNW, it was also present in many train and yard photographs.

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    1. You are right about fleet sizes, but interchange data show that at most, ten percent of the Canadian cars were in the U.S. at any time. That would mean that for U.S. freight info, you have to divide the Canadian fleet sizes by ten.
      Tony Thompson

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  5. Tony, Removing the hoppers from the car counts does make for a better apples to apples comparison. Does the Santa Fe column include the circa 14,000 SFRD refrigerator cars? I don't think it does and you are correct in treating SFRD as a separate entry. Also, is the NYC column just NYC reporting marks or NYC system cars like B&A, P&E, P&LE or PMcK&Y?

    John Barry

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    1. Good point, John, I did indeed omit SFRD. For NYC, I think it proper to omit P&LE, as it was in many ways an independent part of the NYC system. If I remember correctly, though, the others are included.
      Tony Thompson

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  6. The Penn Central merger was in February 1968 and bankruptcy followed in June 1970.

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