Reworking a PFE car kit, Conclusion

This is the concluding post in my description of modifying the appearance of an otherwise stock Red Caboose kit for a reconditioned PFE reefer, Class R-30-9. I began with the prototype background of these cars, created during 1938–1940 from (mostly) Class R-30-12 cars built some 15 years earlier, along with some cars of Class R-30-13. 

“Reconditioning” meant a completely new superstructure, with new and upgraded insulation, but without performing work on the underframe and brake gear (other than needed repairs). In the parlance of the AAR and the IRS, in addition to PFE, this did not constitute rebuilding. But because of improved insulation and ice bunkers, they were given a new car class, R-30-9. 

In the first post of this series, I showed a prototype photo of one of these cars (see that post at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2026/05/reworking-pfe-car-kit.html ). Here is another image, this time showing a car as-reconditioned, at the Stockton, CA ice deck on July 13, 1941 (Wilbur C. Whittaker photo). It has retained the original T-section trucks, but like all the cars of 95737–98718, has new steel ice hatches. Side lettering says it was reconditioned in April 1940, so the paint is barely a year old; it was originally PFE 20028, built in July 1922.

I wanted to model a car like this. After stripping the kit lettering, airbrushing fresh Star brand paint on sides and ends, and adding steel nuts for weight (shown in that first post), I built the kit sub-assemblies of roof and underbody, as I showed in the second post, along with beginning decal lettering with Microscale set 87-501 (the second post may be found at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2026/05/reworking-pfe-car-kit-part-2.html ). 

Once the new decals had been protected with a coat of clear flat, I assembled the car body (so far without an underbody). This looks good so far.

 Next I completed work on the underbody, adding sill steps and Kadee #158 couplers, along with the kit truck frames. Wheelsets were replaced with superior ones from InterMountain. Here is the completed car, nicely retaining the black side sill of the 1950 scheme (side sills became orange in 1951). 

Next came weathering. As always with PFE, this is difficult to choose in the abstract, because of PFE’s extensive car washing (for data see: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2016/11/appearance-of-pfe-reefers-part-3.html ), along with their practice, until the mid-1950s, of repainting any car with even the most minor repairs. I have chosen to apply a light degree of weathering.

The way I did the weathering was following my usual technique with washes of acrylic tube paint (for description and examples, see the Reference pages linked at the top right corner of this post). After adding a coat of clear flat, a few chalk marks, and route cards, the car looked as shown below, being switched to the ice deck in my layout town of Shumala by SP 1284, a Class S-12 0-6-0. 

This is going to be a nice addition to my PFE fleet, and it will certainly be among the cars switched at my next operating session.

Tony Thompson 

That O&W hopper

Awhile back, in the spring of 2024, I reported on an operating session, and buried in the report was commentary about a hopper load of coal sitting at Shumala on my layout, in a car from the New York, Ontario & Western Railway (reporting mark O&W). My preceding comments are in this post: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2024/04/operating-sessions-88-and-89.html . 

The group of modelers who remember this car on Mike Brock’s layout at Merritt Island, Florida must be a small one. Maybe as early as 2015, this car had been snuck onto the layout, and placed under the coal dock at Harriman on Mike’s Sherman Hill layout, by Bill Schneider. Though doubtless intended to both amuse and annoy Mike (a good friend of us all, and the originator and long-time leader of the annual January Cocoa Beach RPM), in fact I think Mike kind of liked it, and it stayed there.

I continue to advise visiting operators that some of the cars they see on the layout will have no paperwork provided (usually cars in the process of being loaded or unloaded), and therefore to leave them where they are. This includes the O&W hopper. 

But is there any way this car could believably deliver a load on my layout? One avenue for delivering a carload of coal comes from  a member of the Pittsburgh Model Railroad Club, when I was a member almost 50 years ago. His mother had worked at one time for a coal broker, whose business was obtaining loads of coal not already sold, and finding buyers for them. The loads would then be redirected to the new destination.

He told me that although most of the business was multi-car lots to larger customers, sometimes a single car would languish because it didn’t fit an immediate customer. With that in mind I pulled out a Shipper Guide to see what I could find. 

(I’ve written a number of posts about these Guides; here is a recent one: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2015/11/waybills-part-44-shipper-guides.html . You can readily find them all by using “Shipper Guide” in the search box at upper right. You can buy any of the 23 Guides now available from Rails Unlimited at: https://railsunlimited.ribbonrail.com/Books/shippers.html .)

The one I chose is for the Chicago & Northwestern, thinking that a Chicago area broker would be about as far west as an eastern load might be redirected.  Here is that Guide cover: 

I selected  a suitable dealer, and made up the following waybill for the only industrial coal user on my layout. The load would be re-billed at origin for its new destination, treating it as a load that had not sold earlier. The bill hasn’t yet received it normal amount of pencil and pen marks by conductors en route. 

Width this kind of paperwork, the slightly famous O&W hopper can actually do work on my layout. All part of the fun, in my view.

Tony Thompson 

Reworking a PFE car kit, Part 2

As I mentioned in a recent post, I have had occasional suggestions about this blog, that I write about PFE car models more often. I’ve now begun one such description, making changes to a Red Caboose kit. I gave the background, and a prototype photo, in the first post. That previous post is here: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2026/05/reworking-pfe-car-kit.html .

The kit is generally well designed, and I like to build it in sub-assemblies, as I think the manufacturer intended. First is the roof, a moderately complicated assembly, being a reefer. It has 20 parts in all. I show the completed roof below. 

Next, I chose to complete the underframe. I always find the placement of the cross-bearers in these kits a little tedious, and the center sills never seem to fit without some fiddling. I drilled out the coupler box lids so that the entire coupler assembly can be tapped for 2-56 screws. The kit includes K brakes, appropriate for these cars after their 1937–1940 reconditioning, but in 1949–1951, all were reconditioned again, this time getting AB brakes, so I dipped into the parts stash and added those brake parts.  

One can note in the prototype photo of PFE 98444 in the previous post, even with the low angle from which the photo was taken, that brake piping and rodding is invisible, due to the center sill. I chose accordingly not to add any of those details. This is, in practical terms, a layout model.  Even so, if one counts the coupler box screws, the underframe assembly contains 29 parts (before adding the six sill steps).

Below is the completed underbody, with the car body in the background, with its interior now painted to eliminate translucence (Tamiya “German Grey,” TS-4).  

I wasn’t sure the color of the car ends matched the roof (though Red Caboose colors were generally pretty accurate), so oversprayed them with Star “SP/UP Freight Car Red” (STR-30), then applied decals from the excellent Microscale set 87-501, containing Dick Harley’s fine artwork. As you see below, detail parts had not yet been installed on these ends. At the time of the 1950 paint scheme, wood-sheathed ends still received the 7-inch lettering you see here.

The car number was chosen as part of the 97,000 series, as I didn’t have a model in that series. Long ago, I conceived the idea of having about one PFE model car for each thousand prototype PFE cars, a fleet of nearly 40,000 cars at the time I model. I haven’t been rigid about this, but use it as a guideline.

With the amount of detail on the sides quite minimal on this kit (just add grab irons and a ladder to each side), I decided to start applying decals to the sides. I used the Microscale set mentioned above. Many modelers wait until all detail parts are applied and the car completed before lettering, but I often letter at an intermediate state if it suits the model. 

The car is now well along, and I will describe its completion and weathering in a following post.

Tony Thompson 

Route cards, Part 34: additional examples

I continue to be, on the one hand, fascinated with the variety of route card appearances, and, at the same time, intrigued with all the prototype information about car movement. That’s why I’m writing this post, continuing to show interesting cards from the Michael Litant collection. You might wish to consult the previous post with some background on these cards (see it at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2026/05/route-cards-part-33-further-examples.html ).  

A classic type of route card is the “return empty” card, this one from the Long Island Railroad to the Pennsylvania. This probably would mean Sunnyside Yard, though the LIRR also connected with the Pennsy via a couple of car floats. The original card is 3 x 3 inches. 

My second example is a good instance of a transfer card, moving a car on UP rails to the CB&Q for its onward journey eastward. The car, UP 541045, was a 50-foot steel box car with a 7-foot door, equipped with Transco loaders (load dividers). Bound for Worcester, MA, the load looks like “Cake” but may be cable or a shorthand notation of some kind. This card is 4 x 5 inches.  

Another interesting card is this one, likely a Wabash on-line card designating a car to move eastward. The clerk only added the car initials, MKT, and no other information. The card is 4 x 4.5 inches. 

A fourth example is a Northern Pacific card, again a transfer card, directing SAL 19862 to be switched to the C&NW. (This was a 40-foot steel box car of 1937-AAR dimensions — 3713 cubic feet and a 6-foot door.) It gives the (rubber stamped) origin of the car as “road haul,” presumably meaning in a train arriving in whatever yard was the location of affixing this card, and the reason for movement was “shipment,” a term almost embarrassingly simplistic. The card is 4 x 6 inches. 

For my fifth card, we have yet another transfer example, evidently from the Georgia Railroad to the Atlantic Coast Line, the car being AWP 50001 (presumably Atlanta & West Point), which was a 50-foot box car with a 9-foot door, equipped with Spartan “Easy-loader” dividers with 9 belts, one of ten cars in that group. The load, syrup, was presumably in containers, thus the importance of the car having load dividers. The card is 3.5 x 3.5 inches.. 

 Finally, I’ve chosen a card showing a whiff of oncoming computerization, a Canadian National card, 3 x 6.5 inches (a little smaller than a punch card). The car listed is Northern Pacific 98472, a 50-foot RBL car, essentially an insulated box car, equipped with cross-bar loaders. 

The cargo is meat, en route to San Juan Packing in Portland, likely Portland, Maine, because of the yard office stamp for Sarnia Tunnel (the tunnel under the St. Clair River between Port Huron, Michigan and Sarnia, Ontario); this would be the original tunnel, opened in 1891). Likely the car would move eastward across southern Canada before re-entering the U.S.

These cars are, as always, interesting in themselves and in what they tell us about patterns of freight movement. Several of them could easily be adapted to model railroad layout use for operation, and the really large lettering on a few of them might show up even in HO scale.

Tony Thompson 

Reworking a PFE car kit

In response to a recent question I was asked (“Why don’t you write more about PFE cars?”), I will describe recent work on a Red Caboose HO scale kit for a PFE reconditioned reefer, kit RC-4121-3, for a car of PFE Class R-30-12-9. There are a number of things I will choose to do for this kit.

I’ll begin with the kit as it comes from the box. It’s nicely decorated (as they always say in magazine reviews), but it is the 1936–1942 paint scheme, with single railroad emblems on each side. It’s shown below.

The car body above is molded in orange plastic. This is both good news and bad news. It means, on the good side, that lettering can be removed without affecting the background color; but on the bad side, the plastic is translucent, and needs to have the car interior painted a neutral color like dark gray to kill the translucence.  

This paint scheme was rare on wood-sheathed cars by 1950 and essentially absent by 1953, because newer paint schemes after World War II, and very large volumes of shop work in the postwar years, meant that a wood-sheathed car like this would undoubtedly have been repainted by my modeling year of 1953. 

Here is the scheme that is far more suitable for my modeling year, in a George Sisk photo from the Charles Winters collection. As is documented in the Southern Pacific Freight Car Painting and Lettering Guide (SP Historical & Technical Society, Upland, CA, 2016), authored by Dick Harley and me, page 141, this is the 1950 PFE scheme, with all side hardware orange, along with sill steps, and both railroad medallions black and white. Dimensional data and other lettering details differ from the kit lettering, so all kit lettering needs to go.

Since there is no significant part of the lettering worth saving, nor is it particularly well rendered, I removed all of it with Scalecoat stripper, on both sides and ends. I then fired up the airbrush and added a coat on the car sides of Star brand STR-27, “Daylight Orange,” (a color adopted by PFE eight years before the more-famous SP “Daylight” trains). The same paint was airbrushed onto the sprues of side hardware parts (sprues D and G), provided in the kit in black, so they would be ready to be applied to the body. 

Next I assembled the kit. For the most part, this is simply following instructions. But there are a few things that require explication. Some have been presented before, in a report on a similar car kit (see that post at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2024/01/reconditioned-pfe-car-part-2-model.html ).

For features of the prototype PFE cars that were reconditioned — being formerly cars of Class R-30-12, they were re-classed when reconditioned as Class R-30-12-9, then after World War II this was simplified by omitting the original -12, making them simply Class R-30-9 — one can consult Chapter 7 in the PFE book (Thompson, Church and Jones, Pacific Fruit Express, 2nd edition, Signature Press, 2000). A number of details are provided about the 7694 cars of this class, PFE’s largest.

As I do when car weights are not supplied in a kit, I glued two 5/8-11 steel nuts inside the car body, using canopy cement. This gives plenty of weight, and canopy glue is perfect for joining dissimilar materials, as is the case here. 

One last point relates to the roof. In the last group of R-30-9 cars, steel ice hatches were applied and ice hatch platforms removed, cars PFE 95737–98718. And note in the prototype photo above of PFE 98444 that wood running boards were retained; all these cars were reconditioned during 1937–1940, when this was usual practice. I will do the same, as I’ll describe in a future post.

Tony Thompson 

Waybills, Part 130: My waybill process

At the recent ProRail operating event, there were as usual many fascinating discussions among attendees, not only during sessions, but also in the hotel at breakfast, or even in the bar in the evening. One of these involved several of us comparing our own and others’ waybill processes in connection with operating sessions. (For comments on the ProRail event, see my post at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2026/04/prorail-2026.html .)

I was reminded in one of these conversations to repeat something that happened a few years ago at the annual Bay Area LDSIG / OpSIG meeting (Layout Design and Operations SIGs); I’ve described these meetings more fully elsewhere: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2018/01/the-bay-area-layout-design-and.html .

One of the people in the audience for my talk at that meeting, which was about prototypical waybills, including a description of the system I use on my layout, asked an interesting question. He asked, “How many waybills do you have to make for each operating session?” I’ve mentioned this question (and my answer) previously, in a blog post (you can find it at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2024/04/waybills-part-114-managing-fleet.html ).

But for convenience, I’ll repeat what I answered. I replied, “I think you’re actually asking two questions. First, probably what you meant, would be ‘How many new waybills do I have to make?’ but implied is a second question, ‘How many do I actually make?’ and I’ll reply to both.”

The answer to the first question was, “Zero,” because I have quite extensive files of existing waybills, certainly at least one for every car in my fleet (almost 500 cars). [I have shown my waybill file system several times, including this one: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2011/11/waybills-15-managing-bills.html .] Here’s the current file box (a commercial product for baseball card collectors), with bills filed by industtry:

The second question is, in some ways, more interesting. The answer is, “Usually a couple dozen waybills,” for several reasons. First, I do find typos occasionally in older waybills, or cases where I made a factual mistake of one kind or another. These are readily corrected from the original Photoshop tiff. 

Second, nearly all freight cars in my fleet have at most four, maybe five waybills in existence; but there are up to 20 possible destinations inbound on the layout, and an enormous number of possible destinations outbound. Additional destinations can readily be added to suit conditions.

Let me mention in passing that I feel strongly about replacing the widely-used “four-cycle” waybills that are commonly encountered; all too often one may be doing switching work and find something like this (drawn from an actual layout, which I won’t name): 

I have commented elsewhere about how my system works (among many examples is this one: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2013/05/waybills-28-waybill-cycles.html ), so won’t go into it here, except to observe that from the original steps in development in 2010, up till now, I have found the new system perfectly flexible and workable in use, to me attractively prototypical in appearance and function, and easy to create, modify, or correct. There do now exist hundreds of waybills in this system, but rarely have I made more than a dozen at a time, so it has never been onerous to maintain or add to the files.

So in a scene like the one below on my layout, with Consolidation SP 2829 switching a nearly empty ballast hopper across Nipomo Street in the town of Ballard, I know that every movement like this is directed by and follows prototype-looking paperwork, and that was exactly what I wanted to accomplish with my waybill system.

I’ve mentioned many times in this blog, and in numerous clinic presentations, that it isn’t my specific waybill design that is important. What’s actually important is the idea of replicating the prototype process and appearance. It can be done in many ways. My waybills are just one of them.

Tony Thompson 

Shipping oranges on my layout

Oranges are probably the canonical California fruit, and although the area I model, the Central Coast between San Luis Obispo and Santa Maria, was not prime orange country, I do know that navel oranges were indeed grown on the Nipomo Mesa, adjoining my fictitious branch line to Santa Rosalia. So that is a crop I can include.  

Oranges in California come in two distinct varieties, the navel and Valencia varieties, and they have different seasons. Below is the crop table for fruit in the area I model, called Guadalupe–Santa Maria. It’s taken from a much larger table that covers the entire Southern Pacific, on pages 442-447 in Pacific Fruit Express (2nd Edition), Signature Press, 2000.

What is shown above for oranges is the navel variety, peak harvest December to March, with lesser harvesting in November and April. By contrast, Valencias in California are harvested from March to October, with peak season  in May to August. This nicely complements the navel season, though the area I model was not Valencia territory.

I have chosen to identify just one of the five packing houses on my layout with orange shipment. It was common for packing houses to specialize in this way. As I have previously described (see the post at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2017/08/produce-shipping-boxes-part-2.html ), I created orange box labels for that packing house, Phelan & Taylor, by modifying a prototype orange box label (used in the real world by a Los Angeles distributor): 

At the packing house, I show field boxes of oranges. Field boxes were large containers used in the orchard during harvest, much larger than the familiar orange crate that was shipped to market. I received these 3D-printed boxes from Robert Bowdidge, and painted the contents in different colors for different fruit and vegetables, orange of course for oranges but also for apricots.  

Then of course waybills are needed. I use a number of destinations, mostly on the East Coast, though Midwestern destinations also appear. Here is an example, including the well-known “capacity” of a standard PFE ice car interior, 462 crates: 

The car that is listed in this waybill, PFE 9071, is part of PFE’s Class R-40-26, and it’s shown below at the East Shumala packing house of Phelan & Taylor for loading. 

The seasonality of orange harvest fits perfectly into my general operating approach, that we treat whatever day we are operating as that day in 1953. So if we were operating on my layout today, May 13, the harvests and other seasonal features will be those of May 13, 1953. Orange seasons fit perfectly into that process. 

Tony Thompson