The peculiar new Walthers steel reefer

I have seen promotional material for the new Walthers “mainline” refrigerator car in HO scale, and wondered what it might be a model of. Since their ads have shown a Fruit Growers steel car, perhaps that was their goal. But they are also marketing two Pacific Fruit Express paint schemes on this car body, so I wanted to evaluate those models.

I have no idea where they got the ideas for their two paint schemes. Neither one makes any historical sense. But before I get to that, let’s look at the car body itself. The photo below shows that the model has molded-on ladders and grab irons. The rendition of the rivet lines of the steel body are not bad, nor is the door appearance. Ice hatches do resemble the Holland hatch covers used by PFE for a time. The running board represents a steel grid, and it is a see-through grid. 

That’s the good news. But the roof is a late-1920s style flat panel roof, not the prototype’s raised panel roof. And the underframe has no relation to any PFE underframe I know of. Aside from the roof and the relatively invisible underframe, the body is not a bad version of PFE’s first steel reefers, Class R-40-10.

Now to the PFE paint schemes they have chosen. The one shown above is a mish-mash of components from different eras, and one wonders what they thought they were doing on this steel body scheme.  I will come back to it, in favor of beginning with the single-emblem scheme, cars that are lettered as Class R-30-13. It’s shown below in a Walthers photo.

This scheme had a UP “Overland Route” slogan emblem on one side, which you see above, and an SP emblem on the other side. The paint scheme as shown above was in use prior to 1936. That’s because it’s the pre-1936 UP emblem with the word “System” in the blue field. That would be all right for the time the R-30-13 cars were built, as would all of the rest of the lettering. But as mentioned, all this decoration is on a steel body, while the lettering is for a wood-sheathed car.

These single-emblem cars have car numbers beginning with “40,” consistent with Class R-40-10, but they are lettered as Class R-30-13, a car with wood-sheathed sides and ends and an outside-metal roof, wood running board, and K brakes: none of those features are on the model. 

In a way, it’s a shame they went to all the trouble to accurately letter the car this way. If it were just a wood car body, the lettering would be quite nice. For comparison, below is a prototype photo (Pullman for PFE). Incidentally, the deep underframe (whitewashed for the photo) is yet another feature missing from the Walthers representation of Class R-30-13.

Now let me return to the steel car. This second paint scheme has car numbers beginning with “41,” again consistent with Class R-40-10, and for that class the car body makes far better sense, even the lack of placard boards on car sides (but unaccountably, they do have placard boards on the ends). Unfortunately, all the dimensional and capacity lettering and data is copied exactly from the R-30-13 model, entirely wrong in almost every detail for a steel-body Class R-40-10.

But the emblems are a problem, too. The chosen “two-emblem” paint scheme, with both railroad emblems on both sides, essentially a 1946–1950 scheme, is fine, but they have chose to letter a red-white-blue UP emblem with the word “railroad” in the blue field, something never done with that emblem. In fact, the first UP emblem to contain the word “railroad” was the black-white one introduced in 1950.

The PFE photo below shows the black-white UP emblem. Clearly Walthers got the white border and the word “railroad” in the upper field, but chose to stay with red-white-blue, an imaginary scheme (it’s shown in the upper photo in this post). 

Moreover, as is obvious in the model photos above, Walthers painted all side hardware orange (ladders, grab irons, and door hardware), consistent with PFE practice beginning in 1948. From that time until 1950, the all-orange sides co-existed with the color two-herald scheme, as mentioned.

Where can you find all these lettering details as to arrangement and dates of use? An excellent book from the Southern Pacific Historical & Technical Society, entitled Southern Pacific Freight Car Painting and Lettering Guide (SPH&S, 2016) contains a thorough and clearly presented description of all the PFE lettering schemes down through the years, organized and written by Dick Harley.

Quite aside from curiosity about how and why Walthers made its peculiar lettering decisions, as a modeler the far more interesting question is, what can be done with this model if you’d like it to be more prototypical? I will turn to that topic in a following post.

Tony Thompson