More on house-car placards

Placards for warning or information about cargoes are very familiar with tank cars, which may carry a wide variety of loads that can be dangerous in different ways. I have written a number of posts about tank car placards, beginning with the prototype, as far back as 2012 (see the post at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2012/03/tank-car-placards-prototype.html ), and also several posts about modeling placards and their use (for example, this one: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2012/12/tank-car-placards-more-on-modeling.html ).

The present post, however, expands on the use of placards on house cars, particularly box cars. This topic too has been touched on before, and as I prefer to do, began with some information about the prototype (such as this post: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2013/11/placards-for-house-cars-prototype.html ). That was followed up by an introductory post about modeling (see it at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2013/11/placards-for-house-cars-modeling.html ).

I didn’t show them in the earlier posts, but I used several of the images of prototype placards (see previous paragraph for links) to make HO scale versions of them. Shown below are a few of them, printed out on a high-resolution color printer at a local copy shop.

However, I’ve never shown examples of applying these placards, so one is shown on a model in the photo below (original model by Richard Hendrickson). You can click on the image to enlarge it if you wish,

Another nice source of placards is a cardstock set marketed long ago by Jaeger. In the modeling post mentioned above, I did show some of the Jaeger placards in use. Here is one of their “unload other side” placard applied to a box car:

Here is another Jaeger example, a “handle with care” placard for furniture. The car obviously, from its door stripe, is equipped with auto racks, but these could be latched up to the ceiling inside to accommodate other cargo, such as furniture.

But of course you don’t really have to have readable legends on something with type this small. You can just as easily use a sharp pencil to suggest that something is present on the placard (feel free to click on the image to enlarge it):

If you look at lots of in-service prototype photos of box cars, you will find placards present on a fairly small minority of the cars, and I have followed that lead with my freight car fleet. House car placards are applied sparingly. But when present, I think they add to the realism of the model.

Tony Thompson