Evaluating the car fleet, Part 2: automobile cars

As I mentioned in the preceding post, back in 2011 I updated all my car fleet plans by car type. Some of them have changed little, despite adding more cars (I think mostly in accord with plans).  I gave the example of gondolas (see that post at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2022/03/evaluating-car-fleet-anew-gondolas.html ). But there are exceptions. This post is about one car type that is an exception: automobile cars.

For many years after the 1920s, the ARA and then the AAR classified all box cars with double doors as “automobile cars,” regardless of actual assignment, intended use, or the presence of special equipment such as auto loaders. It just meant a double-door box car, nothing more.

This is well illustrated by Southern Pacific, which classified all its double-door box cars in Class A (automobile), even though only a minority of the fleet was equipped for or assigned to automobile traffic. That includes auto parts as well as assembled automobiles. This was just as AAR intended.

My post in 2011 about automobile cars described the balance I believed needed at that time. Here is a link to that post: http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2011/02/choosing-model-car-fleet-4-automobile.html ). I did discuss auto parts and assembled automobile routing in some detail.

To summarize, one indication of the cars that would be needed in any automobile car fleet is the route(s) cars would follow, from the upper Midwest, particularly Michigan, where so many auto parts, as well as assembled automobiles, were manufactured, to the railroad you model.  For Southern Pacific modelers, that means primarily the Overland and Golden State Routes. 

For the Overland Route, there exists a very helpful magazine article by Mark Amfahr, “Bay Area Auto Shipments in the Postwar Years,”which appeared in the Spring 2016 issue of the The Streamliner magazine (UP Historical Society), pages 6–13. It contains fascinating data, as shown below.

The reason for these various railroads’ cars, of course, is that most railroads joined into pooling arrangements, usually on the basis that each railroad contributed  the same proportion of the needed number of cars, as their proportion of the total miles distance in the route. 

To illustrate one aspect of this traffic, the 1950s photo below (UP Museum, courtesy Mark Amfahr) shows yard clerks at Council Bluffs attaching a route card to an Erie 40-foot double-door box car containing assembled automobiles. Note that the route card reads “1B,” a UP blocking code indicating priority transfer to SP at Ogden. 

Returning to the graph above, it shows that I certainly need DT&I, Wabash, New York Central, PRR, GTW, and SP cars, all of which are in my auto car fleet. In the previous post on automobile car planning (link shown in the fourth paragraph of the present post), I showed a number of my SP auto car models. I’d like also to show models for some of the other railroads shown in the above chart. Below is the tail end of a Los Angeles-bound auto-parts train, about to arrive at Shumala on my layout.

The models shown above are DT&I 13167, an ancient Athearn metal model, obviously similar to the familiar Pennsylvania X32 cars, and Wabash  45218, an Overland brass model. Note the caboose, incidentally, with its vermilion ends: all of of SP’s pre-1960 bay-window cabooses were built that way (for some background, see: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2022/02/modeling-sp-cabooses-part-4.html ). 

Some additional cars are shown below. Here we see two cars right behind the power on today’s Golden Gate Manifest (GGM), passing the engine terminal at Shumala. The cars are Grand Trunk 595128 (a Proto2000 model) and PRR 58845, Class X32A (a Railworks brass model). Both are in auto parts service, and are returning empty westward from Southern California auto plants, heading for the Overland Route.

I mentioned the specific mainline trains in the foregoing photo descriptions to emphasize that I try to maintain a connection to SP’s Coast Route traffic, even though I can only do so with passing trains, moving from staging onto the layout, and back to staging. For me, this is part of the interest in including the SP main line in my layout.

I have not mentioned Union Pacific automobile cars in the foregoing, but the graph above clearly shows that I need UP cars as part of the auto car traffic to and from the Overland Route. As it happens, my fleet currently only contains a 40-foot auto car.  Obviously a 50-foot car should be added, since the graph shows approximately equal numbers of 40-foot and 50-foot cars in the traffic.

I will return to the creation of a UP 50-foot automobile car model to be part of this traffic in a future post.

Tony Thompson