My latest column in Model Railroad Hobbyist

In the current September issue of Model Railroad Hobbyist, there is the latest column by me in the multi-author series, “Getting Real” (you can find it at: www.mrhmag.com ). It’s about modeling Southern Pacific automobile cars, but it’s also intended to provide prototype information on those cars, because Volume 3 in my series, Southern Pacific Freight Cars, about automobile and flat cars, is out of print and a little hard to find.  

I showed both prototype and model photos of relevant SP automobile car classes for the era I model, 1953. The models are from resin kits in several cases, primarily Sunshine Models, but I included a brass model and some styrene commercial models. 

I also repeated parts of an article I wrote a few years ago, about modeling the Class A-50-17 automobile cars. It was published back in 2015 in the SP Historical & Technical Society magazine, Trainline (issue 122), but I have gotten occasional complaints that it is not easy to obtain, thus this repetition.

Here’s the basic framework that I followed for each car class covered. I began with a prototype photo, often a builder photo like this one for the 40-foot automobile Class A-50-13, 600 cars built in 1937 by the Mt. Vernon Car Co. (Mt. Vernon photo). The 7-foot doors are distinctive, and the white door stripe indicates the presence of Evans auto loaders.

I then showed the HO scale model, and if the model fell short of accuracy in any aspect, I tried to explain how. For this particular class, though, there was no such issue; Sunshine Models issued an excellent and accurate kit for this class. 

My Sunshine model is below. I numbered the model to fall among the 350 cars in the class without auto loaders, thus no door stripe. Note that lettering features have been swapped end for end, compared to the builder photo, above. SP did this after 1946, when introduction of the spelled-out road name would not have fit at the left of the doors.

I also illustrated that there has long been a styrene model that stands in for this class, the 40-foot double-door car from Red Caboose (nowadays, InterMountain). It’s shown below. It’s a nice model in most ways, but its 6-foot doors stand out as inaccurate for the SP class. It can of course serve as a stand-in model, or as I would term it, a “mainline” model. 

To go beyond just showing completed models, I also included a section about one of my efforts to create an accurate model of an SP class that is otherwise unavailable. I did that by making the necessary corrections to a commercial model.

My example, as I mentioned above, was the 1951-built Class A-50-17 cars.  I used a Branchline Trains postwar 50-foot automobile car kit for the project, by removing all the side rivets and replacing them with correct-pattern Archer resin rivets, also creating the correct numbers of side sheets. I repeat below one of the model photos, showing the freshly-applied Archer rivets which create 4 side sheets to the left of the doors, and 6 to the right, called a 4–6 pattern.  

The resulting car uses the kit doors, ends, and roof,  which are correct for the SP cars. When completed, the model went into service on my layout, as you see below.

I hope the MRH article helps a few who haven’t been able to acquire my Volume 3 in the freight car series, through its covering several parts of the section of that book on automobile cars.

Tony Thompson