A steel-sided “War Emergency” gondola model

In the spring of 1942, the newly-formed War Production Board (WPB) announced that freight car production during wartime, they stated, “shall be constructed with the fullest possible substitutions of wood for steel in their superstructure.” 

A very detailed and complete account of the WPB gondola design and its buyers is contained in the excellent Pat Wider article on the War Emergency gondolas in Railway Prototype Cyclopedia, or RPC, No. 28 (RP Cyc Publishing, 2014).

 The Pennsylvania Railroad built the first prototype of the composite 52 ft., 6 in. gondola, by removing the steel sides from one of its Class G28 gondolas and replacing the sides with a Pratt truss and wood sheathing boards. The general appearance is shown below (PRR photos, from the Wider article).

This single demonstration car was the basis for the War Emergency design. The intent from the beginning was that the wood components need only remain during the war, and could be replaced with steel sides after the war, though wood-sided cars did remain in service on several railroads. 

The RPC article shows all the railroad orders for these cars, including the steel-sided rebuilds. The most promising, from my viewpoint, are the PRR and the NYC, since both bought a large order, both did a lot of steel-side rebuilds, and both kept them in service as gondolas. Several of the other owners did post-war conversions that I don’t need to model. 

Here are images of the NYC cars, both an original, top (NYC photo, from the RPC article) and steel-sided with later lettering, bottom (date and location unknown, Tom Martorano collection). Latter photo appears to shown a reweigh date of 11-62.

Starting with the Ulrich model,  I have written before about these gondolas (see: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2022/07/re-working-ulrich-war-emergency-gondola.html ). Those are models of wood-sided cars. My current project is instead a Funaro & Camerlengo one-piece body kit for one of the steel-sided WE gons, specifically the New York Central. The body is very nice. Note that the kit box shows the original wood-sided car (same photo as above).

The Pennsylvania is also a possible candidate, since the F&C kit includes PRR decals. I believe a PRR car would still be in the “circle keystone” scheme in my modeling year of 1953, but I don’t have a photo of a steel car in that appearance. I could probably be okay to use the as-built arrangement, as shown below (PRR photo, Bill Lane collection). The F&C decal sheet can do that scheme, if I were to choose to model the PRR version.

I have begun cleaning up the F&C car body, and will discuss progress in a future post.

Tony Thompson