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©2002-2003 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Legal Stuff N SCALE NEW RELEASES: 75110, $14.55 - 50 Foot Double Plug Door Boxcar Without Roofwalk, Norfolk Southern. Freight car red with mostly white lettering including NS herald and reporting marks on left. Reporting Marks: NS 455350. Approximate Time Period: early 1990's (1992 repaint date given by MTL) to late 1990's. NOTE: This item has been sold out and discontinued. © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.My first look in the research for this car was the Official Railway Equipment Register (ORER) for July 1992, since MTL gives a 1992 repaint date for this car. Nothing doing. The highest numbered NS car is 489025. Well, we can see where it's going, anyway. We know from MTL's car copy that the series was originally N&W 160000 to 161999 and that series and various subseries are listed therein. Perhaps the NS was using open number series for placement of cars as they were repainted. As that freed up series from the Norfolk and Western and Southern, those numbers would be taken for more NS cars. Hey, at least it's plausible. Never mind about those cars still listed with Akron, Canton and Youngstown, Illinois Terminal, Nickel Plate Road, Wabash, and Virginian (!!!) reporting marks in 1992! © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited. Let's skip to the October 1996 ORER, where we find that the highest NS road number was 489667. That's progress, I guess. And we find a very short series of two cars, 455350 to 455351? Is that it? Well, no, not exactly. The series listed just below, 455352 to 455979, has identical dimensions, except for the capacity, and another 628 pieces. That's better. Let's get to those dimensions: 50 feet 6 inches inside length, 58 feet 1 inch outside length-- both of those dimensions just about dead on with the 75000 model with extended draft gear trucks. Also, 14 feet 11 inch extreme height, 16 feet door opening (also checks out), and either 154,000 pounds capacity (455350 and 455351) or 155,000 pounds capacity (the others). What's a half ton among friends? © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited. By January 2000, "CR" was a reporting mark under the Norfolk Southern, the NS numbers had made it all the way up to 850895, and there were a mere two cars left in the series of our current interest. Oh, and there were still four NS cars running around with Wabash reporting marks. Yikes! © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
103080, $23.00 - 60 Foot Excess Height Boxcar, Waffle Sides, Double Plug Doors, Southern Railway. It's always nice to find an exact photo reference to an MTL release on the 'net, and it's even better when it's on the website of a subscriber. In this case it's Joe Shaw, who's got a circa 2000 shot of precisely this car, 43490, on his website. A comparison of an earlier MTL waffle side release to the prototype photo yields good marks from me. It's hard to say "dead on" these days because there's usually some not quite 100% detail someplace, but overall I think folks will be plenty pleased with the fidelity. © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited. Joe adds the following: Jim Eager posted to a discussion list a full roster of all cars of this type built by Berwick in 1978. They went to the Santa Fe, Conrail, the Rio Grande, Milwaukee Road, Missouri Pacific, Norfolk and Western, Southern Pacific, Southern and Western Pacific. (Of these, MTL has done all but MP and SP... so far.) All of these cars were built in just two manufacturing lots with differing details between them. © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited. "Back when I could still trace cars," Joe adds, "traces on the MILW, NW, SOU and SP cars show a significant percentage of them with loads for Windsor, ON (Essex Termininal). [It's probably for a Ford plant.] I don't recall having seen any NS, UP, or CP repaints on these cars yet, so many are probably still in original paint. © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited. April 1981's ORER gives another part of the story: Listed under AAR Class XP, description "Box, Cushion Underframe, 12 DF-1, Adjustable Bulkheads, 50K" is a short series of six cars numbered 43490 to 43495. These cars exceed the Plate F dimension template, meaning, to use the technical term, they're "pretty big." The inside length is 60 feet 9 inches, inside height 13 feet 2 inches. The outside length is 67 feet 9 inches and extreme height 17 feet. The door opening is 16 feet; that's two plug doors of course. The capacity is 7135 cubic feet or 128,000 pounds, so clearly we're looking at relatively light weight but large sized items. Throw in the Damage Free equipment and we're talking fragile stuff too. (Well, perhaps I shouldn't "throw in" DF equipment. Sorry.) When I noted that Joe's photo was Copyright 2000 I skipped right to the January 2002 ORER (which has been getting a bit of use since I picked it up) and found that all six cars are still on the rails. What I didn't expect is that 43490 is most likely in the paint scheme in which it started service, that is, the Southern "green light." Joe adds, "When I traced the SOU cars on 30 March 2002, three were at or near Windsor, Ontario, with the others on CSXT, UP and TFM, in Detroit, MI; Gorham, IL and Mexico respectively. The ones I've shot were almost all heading to or from the Ford assembly plant (Ranger pickups, I think) in Norfolk, Virginia." © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
108060, $15.40 - 100 Ton 3 Bay Open Hopper, Rio Grande (Denver and Rio Grande Western). Coal, coal, coal, lots of coal. The Rio Grande owned almost 2400 hoppers of various types to transport black diamonds by 1970, including the series from which this model was taken. This was a big change for them, according to information on the RPI site, as they'd used drop bottom gondolas for coal hauling until 1952. In fact, there were still more than 1500 of those on the Rio Grande's roster in 1970 as well. © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited. Based on other data from RPI, I've concluded that this is the "as delivered" paint scheme. By 1967 the reporting marks had been switched from the Roman style serif font depicted on the MTL model to a sans-serif Gothic font. The "stacked" Rio Grande logo-- the one that goes with the "Action Road" slogan-- was also introduced in 1967 (that long ago?!?) on a series of RBL cars. © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited. Let's go to the April 1970 Register and check the dimensions of this series 14600 to 14799: inside length 39 feet 10 inches, outside length 40 feet 11 inches. Extreme height is 11 feet even. My measurements of a 108 series car show that it's a little longer and a bit taller than the D&RGW car, but not bad. Capacity is 2600 cubic feet or 154,000 pounds; that's just 77 tons, but the truck capacities have something to do with that as well as the actual car frame. There were 196 cars in this group out of the possible 200. Going on to April 1976, we find 195 cars. By April 1981 this series had been combined with an adjacent one, giving 374 cars from road numbers 14600 to 14999. There were 348 cars in this group as of in July 1989 and 313 in October 1996. Of course by this point the cars may have been brought up to date with the Action Road paint scheme, but there's photo evidence on George Elwood's site that the original scheme still existed into at least into the 1980's. In fact, there's a shot of car number 14627 with restenciled reporting marks and consolidated stencils, but also carrying the as painted speed lettering herald, dating from 1994! There remained about 200 cars in multiple series with DRGW marks under Union Pacific ownership as late as January 2000, but seems to me that the ATP for "as painted" would have been over by then. © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited. N SCALE REPRINTS: 24070, $15.05 - 40 Foot Single Door Boxcar (Superior or "Wide Rib" Door) Without Roofwalk, Illinois Central Gulf. Orange with mostly black lettering including reporting marks and large roadname on left. Large black and white "solid rail" herald on right. Reporting Marks: ICG 416084. Approximate Time Period: early 1970's (1972 merger date for ICG, also 1972 repaint date given by MTL) to mid-1980s. Previous Release: Road Number 416108, March 1974 (initially as catalog number 24298). NOTE: This item has been sold out and discontinued. © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.This is a sentimental reprint for me for two reasons. First, the original run was one of the first two Kadee Micro-Trains cars I bought. (The other of the first two was the D&H 50 foot boxcar.) I can't tell you exactly when this was, since MTL cars generally didn't sell out as fast as they do now. I'm pretty sure of where it was, though, and that would be a store on Hoboken Road in or near East Rutherford, New Jersey (long since gone). © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited. Second, my dad used to ride the New York commuter bus with a gentleman who was employed by the Illinois Central, and then the Illinois Central Gulf, who lived just a couple of blocks from us. His name was Tom and he was in marketing for the road. Occassionally he'd give us a pen or a calendar. It was fun to talk railroading with Tom and look at the ICG and the IC before that from more of a business perspective. © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited. Moving along to the Equipment Registers, we start with the April 1976 edition. Both the reprint and original road numbers fit into this series so we have a two for one special here. Series 416000 to 416999, consisted of 430 cars with AAR Classification "XM" and description the basic "Box, Steel." Inside length was 40 feet 6 inches and outside length 44 feet 4 inches, inside height 10 feet 6 inches and extreme height 15 feet 1 inch. And we have a "door thing"-- an 8 foot door opening on the prototype versus a 6 foot door on the model. Based on a review of the 1974 IC Freight Car Diagrams book on George Elwood's site, the 8 foot door seems to be pretty unusual for the line; I only saw one series (IC 15500 to 15999) versus a number of groups with 6 foot doors. Could be that this group of cars came from the Gulf, Mobile and Ohio side instead. © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited. By April 1981, 40 foot boxcars were going out of style, and the series was down to 267 cars out of a possible 1,000. It's possible that between '76 and '81, more of the former IC's boxcars were reworked and repainted into this group... in other words, between the two Registers there was a "peak". But by October 1986 there were just 3 cars left on the roster. By that time the ICG had downsized their paint jobs as well, to a more simple "ICG" on the left and just the black rail herald without the white background on the right. © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
24260, $21.85 - 40 Foot Single Door Boxcar (Superior or "Wide Rib" Door) Without Roofwalk, CP Rail. "Opposite ends of car?" What is Irwin talking about this time? This is where a picture would be worth a thousand words so I've done that; see Fun With Multimarks elsewhere on this site. © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited. In this particular case, on the first run of the 24260, the multimark is on the "same end" of the car. That means it's on the left side of the car when looking at the brake wheel end of the car, and the right side of the car when looking at the other end. The bottom line is that there's a different set of painting templates for each side of the car. It's almost like painting two different cars. I think that was a major factor in the original run's cost of $19.95, which I think was a major factor in it taking a while to sell out. © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited. However!!! Let me note that most of CP Rail's cars were not painted this way. I guess they understood what it would mean in terms of cost as well. And, in fact, the reprint is also not painted this way; the multimark is on the "opposite side" of the car, which means that the car looks "the same" on either side, with the multimark left of the door in both cases. That's not apparent from looking at just one side, as depicted in the MTL product literature and as it was on the website. Oh, well, Irwin got it wrong at the start. And of course now there is only one set of painting templates required. So why is the reprint still more than the original? Uh, moving right along... © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited. The prototype series of cars existed long before they were repainted. In fact, it looks like these were dressed in the basic mineral red with CPR stepped lettering prior to the multimark. MTL did such cars as a "runner series" of four road numbers as their catalog number 20436. It's not quite the same prototype series as this one (those were road numbers in the 51000's), but the dimensions are very similar. Also, those cars were built by National Steel Car and these were built by ACF according to MTL's car copy. Of course, subtract a roofwalk along the way. © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited. Let's look at dimensions from the January 1985 ORER. There were 2284 cars in the series 52900 to 56024, AAR Class XM, description "Box, Steel, 25K." Inside length was 40 feet 6 inches, outside length 44 feet 4 inches, inside height 10 feet 6 inches, extreme height 15 feet 1 inch. The door opening is 8 feet so there's that "door thing" again. Capacity is 3900 cubic feet or 110,000 pounds. This series dropped off pretty quickly, all the way down to 50 cars by October 1991's Register. © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
33110, $13.70 - 50 Foot Boxcar, Plug and Sliding Door, Nickel Plate Road. The prototype series of cars would have to be among the last sets of rolling stock that arrived on Nickel Plate property before the NKP merger into the Norfolk and Western in October, 1964. My ORER from 1964 is exactly January's so the entry within the NKP listing isn't complete. It shows the series 81000 to 81049, the description "Box, All Steel," the inside length of 50 feet 6 inches, the door opening of 16 feet, and the capacity of 200,000 pounds, but that's it. No other dimensional data and no number of cars. Call it a "coming soon" entry. So we have to go to my next ORER which is April 1970. There we find additional dimensions (outside length, 57 feet 10 inches; inside height, 10 feet 6 inches; extreme height, 15 feet 1 inch), the fact that they've already lost one of the 50 cars, and, via supplemental notes, that the series have 20 inch travel cushion underframes and DF-2 loaders. Of course, the lettering on the car will tell you about the DF and cushion underframe too! © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited. Oh, and there is a minor "door thing" on these cars. The total opening is 16 feet but according to information on the Nickel Plate Road Historical and Technical Society's website that was comprised of a 9 foot sliding door and a 7 foot plug door. The MTL model has an 8 foot sliding door. I don't think this is a big deal. NKPT&HS also notes that the cars were built by General American. © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited. MTL reports that the last of these weren't repainted for the N&W until 1986, 22 years later, but that seems to be a typical schedule. (Refer to the above comments on how Wabash and Virginian cars were still around in 1992.) But there were only 6 left in April 1981 and there was just one around in January 1986 so I think the ATP could be shortened up a bit. And let's not forget the roofwalk removal either. That was supposed to have been done by 1974. © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited. Believe it or not, we can tap George Elwood's Fallen Flags site for another prototype photo: sister car NKP 81045 as it looked in 1967. This one has black ends. The Nickel Plate held onto its steam locomotives, including its famous Berkshires, longer than other railroads, and you'll find a fair number of photos of them on Elwood's site as well along with a bunch of images of diesels that are also now long gone. © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
45200, $10.65 - 50 Foot Flat Car, Fishbelly Sides, Burlington Northern. Very recently added to the Irwin Accumulation of research data is the video presentation "American Railroad Collection Volume 1" (Pentrex, 2002, VHS and DVD). Among the four short films included is "Portrait of a Railroad," a 1973 look at the Burlington Northern produced by the company itself. This is definitely a pre-MTV generation production. Complete with long duration shots, "interviews" with employees, and down home soundtrack, this piece looks almost like it could have been shown as a schoolroom activity at any time from the 1940's through the 1980's. That's actually a good thing for we students of the industry... how much could you really glean from a three-shots per second montage that we're more familiar with today? (And, hey, I'm interested to learn that the venerable AT&T "Our Mister Sun" which was dragged out at least twice a year in my school district, is available on video. Why not? It was helmed by none other than Frank Capra!) © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited. So, you can imagine that I was very carefully watching this film, saying to myself as the newly painted BN boxcars, unit train hoppers, and grainloading covered hoppers went by, "Flatcars! Flatcars!" Wouldn't it have been nice if a bright green BN fifty foot general service flat went by? © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited. Well, if it did, I didn't see it. The closest you get in "Portrait of a Railroad" is some Caterpillar equipment being loaded onto some rather tired looking flats. And not from a side view either. Oh, well. © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited. I was writing the UMTRR in September 1998 when the first run of this car was done so I can recycle those bytes: Repainting began sometime between 1970 and 1976, as seven cars in the series 612700 to 612894 show up in the April 1976 Guide. That figure climbs to 47 in the October 1981 ORER then slips to 40 for the October 1986 book. Then it crashes to a single car in the October 1991 book, so the 1979 repaint quoted by MTL is pretty late in the life of the car, at least with this road number. The model is a little shorter than the prototype which has an inside length of 53 feet 6 inches and an outside length of 56 feet 11 inches. © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited. I can't get an exact match on the 'net but I can get you close on the Northwest Rail Pics site which does carry an image of BN 610265. It's got the same general look and is part of a series of former Northern Pacific flats. Surf to NWRP and start your drill down with the BNSF reference as that's where the BN pics are hiding. I think an important feature shared with the MTL release is the consolidated stencils, which began to show up around 1974. © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
65060, $18.30 - 39 Foot Single Dome Tank Car, Union Tank Car Line (UTLX). Here's the fifteenth number for this entry but just the fourth from the prototype 8000 series for this basic black workaday tanker. The fifteen numbers of this car put it just one behind the current leader, the 65090 Shell, if you're counting. This type of car is just about gone from all American rails now, having been supplanted by more specific commodity based tankers, and of course, larger sized general service tank cars like the one MTL recently introduced. But if you're modeling the thirties through the seventies, it would be hard not to fit this car into your pike. They pretty much roamed everywhere. © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited. There is a time limit for these cars, though, of which I should have been specifically aware, but wasn't, at least not consciously. There's a piece on comtemporary tank car stenciling that appears in the August 2002 issue of Railroad Model Craftsman, which notes that under Interstate Commerce Commission rules, the useful life of a tanker is limited to forty years. That means a car built in 1937 would be sidelined by 1977. The ORER data seems to bear this out. There is the somewhat odd series 10 (?) to 12749 listed in Janaury 1964 which includes 3,379 cars of 80,000 pounds capacity. That group was down to just 697 in April 1976. A quick backtrack through the Westerfield CD-ROM ORER for January 1940 is almost no help at all; a series 2400 to 10499 with no other data, not even a number of cars rostered! © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited. N SCALE SPECIAL EDITION RELEASES: 59580, $23.50 - 40 Foot Steel Ice Refrigerator Car with Preco Fan, Good Humor®. Tan with black lettering. Multicolor Good Humor logo on left and Good Humor truck device on right. Reporting Marks: GH 8002. Second of two in the series. NOTE: This item has been sold out and discontinued. © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.This car has a 1960's version of what I'd call the traditional Good Humor trademark, certainly the one that most folks would associate with the company. That's not what is used today, and there's a corporate reason for the change. The modern Good Humor logo contains the words "Good Humor" in script below a red and yellow heart-shaped device. That device is used throughout the world to designate other ice cream brands that are owned by Good Humor's parent Unilever. For example, in the UK there is Wall's, which is the dominant brand there. In fact, Wall's slogan was "stop me and buy one" which was a reference to... guess what... the ice cream salesman who travelled around neighbourhoods in pedal-powered tricycle carts. A clear parallel to the Good Humor man, eh? Meanwhile, in Brazil the heart shaped logo is above the Kibon brand, acquired in 1997. Down under in Australia it's "Streets" with their popular "Paddle Pop." In Germany it's "Langnese." A statement on the parent Unilever's website reads, "Everyday, more than half a million litres of our ice cream is eaten around the world." Good Humor is part of that immense total. © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited. And on the other side of the car is a depiction of the famous truck. Would you believe that they were outlawed at least once? It seems a Maryland community wanted to slow the growth of street vendors, but in enacting an ordinance, managed to throw the baby out with the bathwater and curbing the famous white trucks as well. A few people "spit the dummy" when that occurred. And therefore the Good Humor man was once again allow to ply the streets. (Note: I have been wondering whether I could fit "spit the dummy" into the column after becoming reaquainted with it via the Melbourne tabloid newspaper. For Americans, a "dummy" is a baby's pacifier. You get the idea.) © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited. Finally, let's mention that "Good Humor trucks" could be big rigs too. The Lanter Company is the primary carrier of Good Humor and Breyers products out of its facility in Sikeston, Missouri. After starting with a little business, GH/B gives Lanter the bulk of its traffic in and out of Sikeston and 40 lanes of the 60 available. That adds up to 1,300 loads per year, including outbounds carried in refrigerated trailers. I wonder how many ice reefer loads that could amount to, and could the rails reclaim that business? They would already know how to paint the cars... © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited. Nn3 SCALE (NARROW GAUGE): No releases this month. Z SCALE:
New Release: The chronology is a little confusing on this new 1:220 entry. Both the July 1987 and the July 1989 ORERs list the Galveston Railway as not yet owning any freight cars. We have to go up to October 1991's Register before, eh, registering a hit with these cars. It's probably fair to state that the SP, which serviced the real thing in 1987, probably still owned or at least leased it from builder Greenbrier (now Gunderson), which is the force behind Golden West Service. © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited. From a prototype fidelity standpoint, the good news doesn't exactly start with the ORER listing. The series 443000 to 459034 is of 155 cars of 57 feet inside length, so the best I could say is that this is a "representative" model of a Golden West bulkhead flat. Even in Z Scale, I think the difference between 40 and 57 feet is noticable. I didn't think that the GVSR had any bulkheads that short, and my ORER lookups show that they did not. I can tell you that the prototype series has hung on through the January 2002 ORER, so "to present" would be the appropriate ATP. © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
Reprint: The prototype, as listed in the April 1952 ORER, comes in at 52 feet inside length, making it a match for MTL's N Scale 44000 body style, but not for its Z Scale 14500 body style, which is also a fishbelly type flat versus the flat sided flat that was the real thing. © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited. The prototype series, 66000 to 66249, had these dimensions: 52 feet inside length, 52 feet 9 inch outside length, 3 feet 7 inch extreme height, 140,000 pounds capacity. The group was at 247 cars in 1952, 219 in January 1964, and 29 in April 1976, six years after the Great Northern was folded into the Burlington Northern. © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited. |