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©2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Legal Stuff N SCALE NEW RELEASES: 20596, $12.80 - 40 Foot Single Door Boxcar (Superior or "Wide Rib" Door), Omaha Road (Chicago, St. Paul, Minneapolis & Omaha). Pullman green with delux gold lettering including reporting marks on left and "Route of the 400" slogan on right (express service scheme). Reporting Marks: CMO 20024. Approximate Time Period: decade of the 1940's, based on the Allied Full Cushion Trucks. NOTE: This item has been sold out and discontinued. © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.The "Omaha Road" is a lot easier to get out in a sentence than "Chicago, St. Paul, Minneapolis and Omaha." So that's what this Chicago and North Western subsidiary was called for short. © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited. Untangling it from its parent is quite a bit more difficult. There is a map in the November 1946 Official Guide of the Railways that is of some value. I can tell you that it reached three of the four cities in its title. Chicago was the one it didn't touch. The key line started in Elroy, Wisconsin on the C&NW line northwest out of Chicago, and arched on up to the Twin Cities of Minneapolis. Along the way branches diverged to Duluth, Minnesota and other points in Wisconsin and Minnesota. From the Twin Cities, a line swung back down to Omaha via Mankato, Minnesota and Sioux Falls, Iowa, with other branches to places like Sioux Falls, South Dakota and Pipestone, Minnesota. Effectively, the Omaha Road was the C&NW's link to the Twin Cities from the east and west, and a method for the Northwestern to get handovers of (usually) friendly Union Pacific traffic from Omaha to Minneapolis and St. Paul. Since some of the North Western's famous "400" trains traveled over Omaha Road lines, it's not surprising that the CMO cars would carry the famous slogan. Most equipment also carried the C&NW herald, with only the reporting marks distinguishing it from the parent's roster. An example is the group of 4-6-2 "Pacific" type steam locomotives the line operated contemporaneously with these baggage express boxcars. © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited. Unfortunately, because these cars are classified as passenger equipment, the UMTRR Accumulation of Official Railway Equipment Registers (ORERs) is a washout. The CMO rosters neatly skip right over the 20000 to 20048 series and pick up at 20050! But since we know from MTL that the cars were built by ACF and delivered in 1941, well before the first PS-1 boxcar was introduced, this body style won't be a perfect match. My sense is that it will be close enough for most folks. Most of the CMO steel boxcar roster was of 10 foot 5 inch or 10 foot 6 inch interior height cars, including the immediately following series 20050 to 22414 (even numbers only). © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited. Overall, the Omaha Road rosters lasted into the 1970's before what was left of them was absorbed into the C&NW proper. The ATP for this car as modeled by MTL is going to be over a lot sooner than that, since MTL itself discloses that the as-delivered Allied Full-Cushion Trucks were replaced with Commonwealth trucks by 1952. © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited. This isn't the first Micro-Trains release for the Omaha Road. Back in June 1987 the 55250 offset hopper was issued with C&NW paint and CMO reporting marks. It's one of the more sought-after cars in its body style series. © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
38300, $19.60 - 50 Foot Plug Door Boxcar Without Roofwalk, Union Pacific. Although the cars date to 1957, the paint scheme doesn't. This is most likely the third decoration that they would have worn, following the as-painted "Be Specific" (really!) scheme and the "Automated Railway" scheme that was applied beginning in the early 1960's. "We Can Handle It" debuted around 1970 or so. Plain brown with varying minimalness of white lettering came after, but let's not talk about that! Suffice to say that scheme complexity declined over time. © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited. Also since the cars date to 1957, they were originally built with roofwalks, which were pulled later. But as with many "boxcars" with plug doors, these were dubbed AAR Class RBL, as in refrigerator, from the get-go. The MTL-given service date was 1975 so let's check the April 1976 ORER. The series 499000 to 499299 was described as "Refrigerator, Steel, 9 Belt DF Loaders, Plug Doors" and numbered 264 pieces. Inside length was 50 feet 1 inch and outside length 54 feet 6 inches. The door opening was 7 feet 7 inches wide, a little smaller than usual, and come to think of it, the inside height was smallish too at just 9 feet 7 inches. Could have been insulation inside the car which limited its useful area. Capacity was 4477 cubic feet or 100,000 pounds. © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited. The "Automated Railway" and "We Can Handle It" slogans continue to co-exist with the successor plain brown on Union Pacific rolling stock to the present day, but not on these cars. The series was down to a scant 28 by the January 1985 ORER and was gone completely by 1989. It's possible that they were downgraded to maintenance of way status, or maybe just plain boxcar status, and renumbered. But even so, that would be the end of the ATP. © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
39220, $12.55 - 40 Foot Double-Sheathed Boxcar, Single Door, Toronto, Hamilton and Buffalo. The Toronto, Hamilton and Buffalo actually served only the middle of the three cities in its title with its own track. Had it reached all three of the locations, the route of the TH&B would have resembled a boomerang around the west end of Lake Ontario. Since its two corporate parents, Canadian Pacific and New York Central, had trackage of their own into their respective places of interest, only a connector was required. And although it did originate and terminate a fair amount of traffic on its own rails, the TH&B was primarily just that, a connector. The line did more or less operate into Toronto on the CP and into Buffalo on the NYC, so the name was not completely fraudulent advertising. © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited. Not that it didn't initially have ambitions to connect all three cities in its name on its own. When chartered in 1884 by the Ontario Legislature, that was the intent. But the lawmakers included a "gotcha"-- the TH&B was on its own to do the build. It couldn't merge with, lease, buy from, or pool with any other railway. As you may know, those were all common ways for a railroad to grow, and often that growth was enabled by corporate shenanigans. Without that, eh, freedom, the TH&B quickly found its mission to be impossible. Eventually, though, some loopholes were found, charters revised, and laws and by-laws enacted, and when the dust cleared in 1895, the NYC was 73 percent owner of the line (36 of that percent through subsidiaries Michigan Central and Canada Southern) and the CP had the other 27 percent. The Penn Central absorbed this controlling interest from the New York Central, but Conrail wasn't allowed to retain it and so it was sold to the CP in 1977. The TH&B continued as an independent entity until 1987 when it was officially absorbed. Much of the road east of Hamilton remains in service as various subdivisions of the Saint Lawrence and Hudson operation of CP. © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited. The double sheathed boxcar series is shown on the website of the TH&B Historical Society as numbered from 4500 to 4799 and residing on the TH&B from 1941 to 1976. Since these cars were built in 1918, they had to start someplace else, and MTL gives us that data point in their car copy-- they came from the NYC. The TH&B HS website thoughtfully includes a scan of the line's ORER page from 1951, the year MTL says these cars were serviced. At that time there were 274 cars in the series, described as "Box, Steel Underframe, Double Sheathed" with AAR Classification XM. The inside length was 40 feet 6 inches, inside height 9 feet (a little shorter than the model), and outside length 42 feet 2 inches. The door opening is 6 feet and the capacity a rather odd 91,500 pounds. In January 1964 this group was down to just 14 cars, having been displaced by all steel cars such as the ones modeled as Micro-Trains catalog numbers 20036 in orange and black (released October 1990) and 20320 in boxcar red (released October 1981 and quite scarce). © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
51220, $33.00 - 34 Foot Wood Caboose, End Cupola with Straight Sides, Western Pacific "Zephyr" Scheme. OK, let's get this out of the way: This is the most expensive Micro-Trains regular run release ever. And that's counting the TOFC cars (the most expensive of those was $31.20 MSRP). Given the complexity of the paint scheme including the zebra stripes on the ends, the orange band and the WP herald, I'd like to say that I'm not surprised. But this is still one expensive 'boose. © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited. It's fortuitous for my research purposes that a very similar custom painted MTL caboose was discussed at some length on the wp-list@yahoogroups DL not long before this car was released. But perhaps it's not fortuitous that the thrust of that discussion is that the MTL cabeese body styles aren't a perfect match for anything that the WP or its Sacramento Northern subsidiary operated. There were no "passenger steps" or four windowed cabeese on the WP. Perhaps the closest match to the MTL 51000 is a group of cars dubbed the "Gould standard" by Garth Groff. It's a design shared with the Rio Grande and Missouri Pacific. These have a taller, narrower cupola, three windows per side, and quite ornate and unusual steps down from the platform, described at least once as "tender steps". A statement by Micro-Trains with respect to this car, posted to its micro-trains@yahoogroups.com DL and to my umtrr@yahoogroups DL (and subsequently unofficially crossposted elsewhere) cited a photo of WP 602 from the 1994 Portola Railroad Museum Calendar, which looks to me like a "Gould standard" 'boose. © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited. I think it's fair to once again underscore the impracticality of a mass-market manufacturer to make cabeese customized to the idiosyncracies of the prototypes, as most "crummies" shared little in the way of standardization across roadnames. Suffice to say that brass (when available), scratchbuilding, or heavy-duty kitbashing remain the only ways to go to get closer to what the WP ran. Someone on the wp-list did some number crunching and came up with a number higher than $33 to kitbash and paint a more prototypical model. © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited. The Gould Standard cars were apparently gone from the WP by 1956, noted by both Grant Vogel and Garth Groff in response to a query I posted on the wp-list. Garth looks after a nice website which, while focusing on the subsidiary Sacramento Northern, does offer data on the parent WP as well. Check out Garth's "Sacramento Northern On-Line" site... and don't overlook the rest of it! Thanks also to the several UMTRR readers who pointed me there. © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited. Meanwhile, the California Zephyr which inspired this paint scheme... well, that's the stuff of legend. Christened in a formal ceremony by actress Eleanor Parker and officially accepted "for the people of California" by its then-Lieutenant Governor, the CZ made its inaugural run on March 20, 1949. This train was streamlined all the way, and made the run from Chicago to Oakland in about two and one-half days, specially scheduled to traverse the most scenic areas of the route during the day. This included, of course, the WP's trackage through the Feather River Canyon. The train was a joint venture of the Burlington, the Rio Grande and the Western Pacific but when I picture it in my mind, it's being pulled by the orange and silver units of the WP. Amtrak still operates a train called the California Zephyr, but it's not the same. There is a "virtual museum" of the real thing on the net, and there are no shortage of print references, either. © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited. N SCALE REPRINTS: 28130, $12.00 - 40 Foot Wood Single Sheathed (a.k.a. "Outside Braced") Boxcar, Single Door, Pennsylvania Railroad. Iron Sesquioxide red (OK, "boxcar red") with white lettering including roadname and number on left and small circle keystone herald on right. Road Number: 564279 (will be "PRR 564279" on website listing). Approximate Time Period: late 1910's to mid-1950s. Previous Release: Road Number 564274, December 1992. NOTE: This item has been sold out and discontinued. © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.The Pennsy, which was, let us say, quite fond of using its own designs for freight cars, actually did have USRA cars on its roster. Case in point is the X-26 car reprinted this month by MTL; it is based on the United States Railway Administration plans. (The USRA are the people who brought you nationalization of the rail system during World War I.) There were 9,900 of these cars built for the Pennsy; once again, a single class of car on the PRR outnumbers the entire rosters of most other railroads. © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited. The PRR.Railfan.Net site is once again a terrific prototype reference, as it was for MTL's Pennsy Depressed Center Flat car. The comparison of the 28000 series body style to the car drawings looks fairly good. The drawing shows a 44 foot 7 1/2 inch "coupled length," a 42 foot 8 1/2 inch length counting the roofwalk overhangs, and a 42 foot 1 1/2 inch length over the striking plates. Inside height is 9 feet 6 inches and extreme height is 14 feet 3/4 inch. That's with the vertical brake wheel... oops, the MTL 28000 series has a horizontal brake wheel. That's not to say that the Pennsy couldn't have changed the position of the brake wheel following construction. © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited. The ORER for April 1928 shows the series 564270 to 566090 to be of 1814 cars of PRR Class X26, AAR Classification XM, description "Box, Steel Frame." There's two more X26 groups, numbered 596001 to 596450 and from 598438 to 598453, adding 411 more cars. And there are other X26 gangs scattered through the 500000 series of the P Company. There were a lot of them, but still outnumbered by the X29 series which was more than 10,000 strong. © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited. Be careful with your approximate time periods, though. According to a description and accompanying photo on the Steamtown site, validated at the prr.railfan.net site, the X26 fleet morphed considerably during its run on the P Company. Originally they were mostly wood. Then they got a steel roof and ends and became X-26b's. Finally the sides were changed to steel and they became X-26c's just before the Second World War. Perhaps because of this, the X26s in total remained a large group on the Pennsy through the 1960's, but the original X26 single sheathed cars were pretty much gone by 1954. There's a more complete description of the X26 cars and particularly the X26c's in the August 1992 issue of Rail Model Journal. The paint scheme is probably good for most if not all of the ATP; I don't recall seeing pictures of single sheathed Pennsy cars in anything other than the "circle keystone." © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
30030, $18.80 - 50 Foot Exterior Post Boxcar, Double Door, Longview, Portland & Northern. Freight cars move around, locomotives move around, sometimes even stations move around. But do entire railroads move around? This one did. I expected there to be nary a reference to the Longview, Portland and Northern on the web, but I was incorrect. There is a short review of the LP&N written by Glenn Laubaugh for the Pacific Northwest Chapter of the National Railway Historical Society. The LP&N was a unit of International Paper, and was actually operated from 1922 to 1953 from Longview Junction to Ryderwood... Washington! The Official Guide of the Railways for December 1951 shows interchange with the NP, UP, GN and Milwaukee Road at Vader Junction, Washington... no relation to Darth Vader, I assume-- sorry. That location was the other side of the Columbia River from Oregon. The LP&N operated other trackage in Washington and also the former Willamina and Grand Ronde, and then finally the LP&N to which MTL refers, in the area of Gardiner, Oregon. © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited. You can also check the October 2000 issue of Rail Model Journal for a color photo of the very car LPN 52079 which was taken in February 1980 by Jim Eager. The car is from the series 52000 to 52099 which was built by FMC. The prototype is actually of 52 feet 8 inch interior length, not the typical 50 feet 6 inches -- a "length thing" as opposed to a "door thing"? The two feet of extra length was to more easily enable lumber service. There were seven panels either side of the door, versus the five and eight arrangement on the MTL model. The ORER for April 1981 gives the rest of the key dimensions: 11 foot interior height, 59 foot 2 inch outside length, 16 foot door opening, 152,000 pounds capacity. At this point the LP&N was operated in two segments: 3 1/2 miles at Gardiner, Oregon, connecting with the Southern Pacific, and 29 1/2 miles around Chelatchie, Washington, connecting with the Burlington Northern. © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited. Here's a surprise: While the LP&N hung on through the 1990's, these cars weren't part of the story: they are out of the ORER by the January 1985 issue. They weren't just renumbered, either: no 52 foot boxcars were in the consist at all. It's possible that they were transferred to another International Paper operation, but that is a question left to another day. A UMTRR reader did note to me that the cars, though relettered for another line, do exist, and still "Love Oregon." © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
56170, $14.25 - 33 Foot Two Bay Hopper, Rib Sides, Flat Ends, New York Central. Here's a reissue different enough from the first run to get the Official UMTRR designation of "not a reprint." The 1986 run of the 56170 would have an ATP starting later based on the bolder NYC reporting marks; in fact it's stenciled with a reshop date of 1960. Which means it should have been painted black, not freight car red, as the NYC switched to that color in the late 1950's, but that's another story. © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited. While freight car red, in fact, was the standard for Central open hoppers in the 1940's and 1950's, there was a subtle change in the reporting marks style for ribside hoppers along the way. At first, there was one digit of the six digit number under the "N", then three squeezed under the "Y" and finally two placed under the "C". You might also think of this style as being "centered" to use the word processing term. The later version of the reporting marks were more like "left and right justified" with two digits of the road number under each of the "N" "Y" and "C". There are illustrations of both of these styles in the Morning Sun Color Guide to New York Central Freight and Passenger Equipment, page 59. There's a three-quarter view of NYC 838490, just five digits off the MTL model, as lensed in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1946. The later version is shown in a circa 1954 shot. © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited. The series 837000 to 838499, as listed in the January 1940 ORER (Westerfield CD-ROM), could hold 1500 cars, but there were only 481 in the group. The inside length was 30 feet 6 inches, outside length 31 feet 11 inches, and extreme height 11 feet 5 inches. These were of 110,000 pounds capacity, or 55 tons, which was one way they were categorized. Here's a reversal: The series was up to 1,434 cars in the July 1950 Register (Westerfield CD-ROM). That prompted me to go back to the January 1940 ORER and check the listing for the CCC&StL, also known as the "Big Four" and the NYC subsidiary from which these cars came. Sure enough, there are 1,509 cars in the series 82000 to 83998. By the way, the initials of the CCC&StL stand for Cleveland, Cincinnati, Chicago and St. Louis, and I always have to look that up to get the order of the "C"s right! Moving forward again, in the January 1959 ORER (Westerfield CD-ROM) there are just 78 cars left in this once large contingent, and so much for my running this car on my 1963-era pike. © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited. N SCALE SPECIAL EDITION RELEASES: 21300, $18.95 - 40 Foot Plug Door Boxcar, Reese's® Peanut Butter Cups. Orange with brown lettering and large brown, yellow, black and white Reese's logo across car. Reporting Marks: HFC 7602. Sixth of a planned twelve releases in the Hershey's® series. NOTE: This item has been sold out and discontinued. © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited."Did you know," the Reese's website states, "that Reese's makes enough Peanut Butter Cups in a year to feed one cup to every person in the USA, Japan, Europe, Australia, China, Africa and India." I guess our friends in Canada are out of luck. Well, you can have mine. I've never been fond of peanut butter. © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited. But I have been fond of the commercial series from back in, who knows exactly when. The set-up was two people on a collision course of some type, one holding a chocolate bar and the other a container of peanut butter. The collision occurred, followed by one person complaining, "You got chocolate in my peanut butter!" and the other complaining, "You got peanut butter on my chocolate!" Then each had a taste and agreed that the result of the collision was delicious. But obviously there was an easier way to taste the "Two great tastes that taste great together." That would be a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup. More recently the advertising tag line has been "There's no wrong way to eat a Reese's." © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited. In between, a brand extension of the standard PB cup was given a tremendous boost by a little fellow that needed to "Phone Home". Originally, there were other candy manufactureres that were given the chance to do a product placement in the movie "E.T. The Extraterrestrial" but when Hershey's gave the go-ahead for Reese's Pieces, sales took off faster than, well, a UFO. E.T. is back for his twentieth birthday party (Twenty? Yikes!) and Reese's Pieces is right there again. Meanwhile, other brand extensions have included Reese's Sticks and Reese's Crunchy Cookie Cups, and the company even sells its peanut butter as a separate item. © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
59570, $23.50 - 40 Foot Steel Ice Refrigerator with Preco Fan, Good Humor®. Another in the Unilever stable of frozen confections is Good Humor, most famous for, of course, its white trucks. Well, maybe that's not "of course" to the younger demographics; perhaps "Good Humor" is just another store-bought brand of ice cream. © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited. "It's the Good Humor man!" was a cry often heard in our house when I was growing up in the late 1960's. During the early days of our stay in Suburbia, the original sound of tinkling bells accompanied the arrival of the Good Humor truck. Once in a while (far fewer times than we requested!) we would actually go out and purchase something from the man with the truck. There were basic ice cream bars as well as more exotic items. I usually went for the vanilla ice cream bar on a stick, covered with chocolate coating. Or maybe a "sundae cup" which was vanilla or half vanilla and half chocolate ice cream with a swirl of fudge sauce within. © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited. The classic Good Humor man was dressed neatly, all in white-- one time I made the mistake of wearing a white shirt with mostly white pants and was asked, "What are you, the Good Humor man?" Well, no, I didn't have a hat. And as I recall, he made change with a changer, you know, one of those cool devices that could be worn on a belt. The Good Humor Man could have been an employee of the company, or of a distributor, or maybe even an independent; it seems to have depended on the territory. The Good Humor Company itself only owned and operated about 200 trucks in the early 1960's and that doesn't even seem to be enough to cover Jersey, never mind the rest of the country. © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited. Apparently the Good Humor truck is still criss-crossing streets in some neighborhoods, but it's long gone from the one I grew up in and I've never seen one roaming around near here at UMTRR HQ. But there are still pockets of activity using the trucks, and, as you'd probably surmise, somewhat of a collector market for them. So it's the nostalgia angle that could be the attraction for this short MTL series of two. Not like that's a bad thing. © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited. Nn3 SCALE (NARROW GAUGE): No releases this month. Z SCALE:
Reprint: The previous run goes back so far that I actually have the road number in an old copy of the Sootsman Guide. (I won't make a habit of quoting the previous releases in Z but when I do have it handy I'll pass it along.) June 1985 was apparently the date of release of a number of the 14700 series of cabeese according to Sootsman. © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited. But that doesn't say anything about its prototype fidelity. Although I'm not what I'd call an unqualified expert on the NYC, I am reasonably sure that there wasn't anything like this on the real Central's roster. The closest I can come is a photo of and citation for NYC 17836 in the Morning Sun's NYC Color Guide to Freight and Passenger Equipment, page 89. It is an ex-Michigan Central car rebuilt with steel framing sometime in the 1925-1929 time period, as noted in the MTL car copy, and had a carbody 30 feet long. It is also a wood sided caboose with end cupola, four windows per side and truss rods. NYC 17841 from the same page of the same book is similar but has three windows per side. Oh, well. © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited. |