Freight car bogosity

This post may, I suppose, be seen as not entirely serious, but I hope it does contain a serious point buried somewhere within it. It was occasioned by a slide I found, taken on my old layout in Pittsburgh quite a number of years ago. The photo showed a mainline train operating on my modeled segment of Southern Pacific’s Coast Division, and though the photo isn’t very sharp or well-lit, I noticed something in the shot that made me smile — maybe in a rueful way.

What I noticed in that train was a piggyback flat car, a model that has mostly been in “dead storage“ in the intervening years, an old Ulrich flat car for piggyback service. Why was it bogus?

First of all, the flat car: it’s a steel fishbelly sidesill design, but different from any actual SP flat car. I did number it within an SP 40-foot flat car class (Class F-50-10, cars built at Sacramento General Shops in 1927), but those cars had straight side sills, not the fishbelly of the Ulrich model. More importantly, SP’s Pacific Lines, which I model, never had any 40-foot piggyback flats. To be sure, the T&NO did operate such cars, but they would not have operated in California in the earliest days of SP piggyback, 1953, the year I model.

Moreover, the Ulrich model has a trailer support “post” that works well with the Ulrich 35-foot trailers, such as you see above. But without the trailer, the appearance is, shall we say, less than realistic, despite the nicely rendered bridge plates and rub rails.

But there are even more important reasons than the above for concluding that this model is bogus. SP began its piggyback service handling its own Pacific Motor Trucking (PMT) trailers exclusively, and in the 1950s did not accept anyone else’s trailers for movement. So the very idea of a Pacific Intermountain Express (PIE) trailer on an SP flat car in 1953 (as in the upper photo, above) is completely incorrect.

All this history and more is contained in Volume 3 of my series, Southern Pacific Freight Cars (Signature Press, 2004). Further history that places SP operations in context with the rest of North American railroads is David DeBoer’s Piggyback and Containers (Golden West Books, 1992). It was not until late 1959 that SP gave up on its “in-house” piggyback with PMT only, began to purchase conventional 85-foot piggyback flat cars, joined Trailer-Train in 1960, and began handling trucking company trailers. So it’s clear that a commercial trailer on an SP flat car on my 1953 layout is way wrong.

But I have a confession to make. Every now and then, I have slipped this car into a mainline freight during an operating session, and wait to see if anyone notices. So far, no one ever has. Or maybe was too polite to comment . . .

Tony Thompson