In preceding posts, I described a somewhat meandering project to build a 50-foot automobile car from a Branchline kit, and add a Viking roof (because I had one in my stash). My first plan was to do this for the Chicago & North Western, as described in the initial post in this series (see it at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2025/06/a-simple-freight-car-kitbash.html ).
But upon discovering that I already had a 50-ft. C&NW auto car with a Viking roof (memo to self: check fleet before dreaming up projects), I decided to pivot to doing an Erie car, even though it meant removing the Dreadnaught ends I had already applied to the Branchline body (that is presented in the third post in this series, which can be found at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2026/04/my-50-foot-automobile-car-part-3.html ).
I replaced the Dreadnaught ends with inverse Hutchins ends from Chad Boas, and continued onward to finish the body details, then painted the model with boxcar red sides and roof and black ends, as was common on Erie cars of the decade after World War II. That work is shown in Part 4 of this series (you can see it at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2026/07/my-50-foot-erie-auto-car-part-4.html ).
In trying to understand the Erie 50-foot automobile cars, I turned to the April 1940 Official Railway Equipment Register (ORER). There I found several groups of such cars. First was series 68100–68199, cars with paired 6-foot side doors, and series 62200–68224, almost identically dimensioned cars except for paired 8-foot doors; and cars 68225–68299, again, cars with 6-foot doors.
Since my Branchline car body has 8-foot doors, my choice of number series was obvious. Luckily I was able to obtain a nice photo of a car from this series, which is shown below. You can just see that it does indeed have a Viking roof, and though the black ends are not very visible, what is visible is consistent with the Hutchins ends. And this is the paint scheme I wanted to apply, with the six-foot herald. Incidentally, in this photo, only the right-hand door is open.
In the year I model, 1953, there were 24 of the original 25 cars in the series Erie 68200–68224. Of those, 16 had auto loading racks and thus had AAR mechanical designation XMR, while 8 of them had racks either disabled or removed, and were AAR designation XM. That includes the car shown above, 68220, and the car number I chose to model, 68214.
You can click on the image above to enlarge it. If you do, you may note that the capacity of this car is somewhat surprising, only 70,000 pounds, a value confirmed by the ORER.
The photo above shows clearly the arrangement of side lettering. It also suggests what the end lettering arrangement is, but a better view is in the Magor view shown in Part 4 (link above). Here is just the end portion:
I dug around in the decal stash I inherited from Richard Hendrickson, and found Champ set HN-63, and also a set HB-3 with the large Erie emblems. Dimensional data were pieced together with elements from two Champ data sets HD-2. Below is a view of the model with lettering applied; I did apply the 70,000 pound capacity. Next comes trucks and couplers, the running board, and then weathering.
As mentioned earlier, I applied a Kadee 50-ft. running board, attached with canopy cement, along with Kadee #158 couplers and the kit truck frames with InterMountain wheelsets. I then used my ordinary process of weathering, based on washes of acrylic tube paints (descriptions and illustrative example in the “Reference pages” linked at the top right of this post). Last, I added a few chalk marks and route cards.
This was an interesting if somewhat circuitous project, with the false start on a C&NW car; but in the end I created a car I wanted to have on the layout. That is tops among my criteria for freight car projects.
Tony Thompson
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