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©2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Legal Stuff NOTE: This archive edition covers single car releases only. Reviews of and commentary on Micro-Trains locomotives (including the FTs) and Special Edition sets such as the Evergreen Express are available exclusively in the e-mail subscription edition of the UMTRR. N SCALE NEW RELEASES: 20626, $21.30 - 40 Foot Single Door Boxcar (Superior or "Wide Rib" Door), Pullman-Standard Exhibition Car. Orange and brown sides and ends, orange roof with aluminum roofwalk. Yellow trucks and couplers. Black and yellow lettering including reporting marks and "PS-1 Pullman Standard" on left and "This is the 50,000th PS-1 Box Car" on right. Reporting Marks: PSX 1. Approximate Time Period: early to mid 1950's (1953 built date given by MTL). NOTE: This item has been sold out and discontinued. © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.The year 1953 was among the best for Pullman-Standard. It had successfully introduced the PS-1 boxcar and was cranking it out in droves. And mid-year, it debuted the PS-2 covered hopper, and would sell fleets of them too. Still to come were the PS-3 open hopper, the PS-4 flat car and the PS-5 gondola. The milestone of 50 thousand freight cars produced would easily be eclipsed... we've already seen the MTL rendering of the 200,000th car produced out of just one of their plants! And they'd go on to build 200,000 PS-1 boxcars as well. But 50,000 cars ain't chopped liver either, and the Chicagoland-based company decided to celebrate. After all, thirty years later they'd be out of the railroad business. And the Michigan City, Indiana plant where this car was built would be gone sooner than that, in 1970. That installation had started as the plant of Haskell and Barker before being bought by Pullman, which gave P-S its entry into the freight car market. © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited. It's interesting that MTL would cite Atlantic City, New Jersey, circa June 1953 as one of the points at which this car was put on display. Perhaps they've got a citation pointing to this event somewhere. While the seashore resort and later gambling mecca was once popular enough to have two competing (and largely parallel) passenger lines serve it, it never struck me as a major destination for inbound and outbound freight. (Salt water taffy? Shells? Nah.) Could be that the car was exhibited at or near Convention Hall for some kind of function? It wasn't the Miss America pageant, since that takes place in September. Although it would be interesting to imagine the newsreel footage... "Miss Florida looks ravishing in her orange and brown colored gown, which perfectly matches the orange and brown boxcar with which she is posing..." Uh, maybe not. But it is true that railroad-themed conventions were held at the Jersey Shore town, as several readers have noted to me. © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited. And then, of course, there are the yellow trucks. I'll bet there's a story behind those! And here it is... the UMTRR has obtained a scan of an illustration of the P-S car, from one of Pullman's own brochures, confirming that there really was a prototype for this car. And yep, the trucks sure look yellow. The better to see the details, you know; this was a car meant for exhibition and examination. I'd sure like to know how they kept the trucks clean, though. The lettering is also straight out of the 1950's, and evokes memories of something called Letraset, which was a line of dry transfers that, prior to the days of electronic publishing, was in very common use in ad agencies and the like. And at least one high school newspaper, sometime after the fifties. © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
56340, $15.95 - 33 Foot Twin Bay Hopper, Rib Sides, Flat Ends, Southern Pacific. Here's a busy little hopper... I'm referring to the amount of lettering, that is. This one has more print than some boxcars of the period! This is actually the third SP hopper to be released in MTL's 56000 series. The first was the 56070, done in 1978 in road number 13088, and reprinted in 1979 in road number 13091 (that one's considered rare). That first version is similar to this one, but the positions of the herald and roadname are reversed. The second Espee hopper to come down the track was the 56250, in 1992. That one is similar but doesn't include the large roadname. The two releases seem to share most of the same dimensional data including a built date of 1925. The 56250 is also somewhat infamous in that it was released with two different labels, one giving the railroad as "Southern Pacific" and one as "Southern" which caused a little flurry of collector activity back in '92. © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited. This SP hopper is in an entirely different prototype number series from the first two releases. This may reflect a renumbering program, not a different actual prototype group of cars. This time, they're in the group 460557 to 461431, as listed in the January 1959 ORER (Westerfield CD-ROM). The inside length was 31 feet 6 inches, outside length 32 feet 7 inches, extreme height 10 feet 9 inches. There were 875 of these 70 ton hoppers in service. The description is interesting: "Hopper, All Steel, Enterprise." They don't mean Captain Kirk's (or Picard's) starship. No, actually the Enterprise refers to the hardware below the bay. If it's "selective" then the material in the hopper can be dumped either between or to either side of the rail. If it's not selective, then it's not as flexible. According to an original specification sheet posted on Richard Percy's SP Modeler's Page ( http://espee.railfan.net ), the series in question had Enterprise Selective doors mounted lengthwise on the car, that is, across the bottom along the side. "Crosswise" would be the description of how the MTL model's bay doors are. So what we have here is a different kind of "door thing" than what is usually reported in these bytes. Before anyone throws too many stones (which is probably what these hoppers hauled, by the way), let me hasten to point out that nobody I know of commercially produces in N Scale the technically correct kind of hopper that the SP owned in this series. © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited. Stepping quickly through the ORERs we find that in January 1964 there were 874 cars in the series, in April 1970 there were 844, in April 1976 there were 559, in April 1981 there were 353, in January 1985 there were 146, and in July 1989 there were still 54. A more than thirty year life span would have been pretty good, but I wouldn't expect the paint scheme as modeled by MTL to have made it that far. In fact, the spec sheet I referenced shows a hopper in yet another variation, with the large roadname but without the herald. So perhaps we can make it a quartet of versions of Espee lettering on these? With a little lettering removal, you wouldn't necessarily have to wait for the next run. © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
93060, $23.70 - 3 Bay ACF Center Flow® Covered Hopper with Round Hatches, Ag Processing Inc (AGP). "A Farmer Owned Company" is the headline on Ag Processing's website. It was formed in 1983 with the mission "to serve local cooperatives and agricultural producer-owners by performing the primary business functions of acquisition, processing, and marketing of agricultural products." It lists its "Reason for Existence" as "to put more money into the pockets of producers and do the best possible job of managing its owners' investments." Can't blame them for that, that's what a cooperative is supposed to do! (And they're a lot more up front about it than, ahem, some other companies.) © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited. The company history shows that the seed of AGP (pun intended) was a three way pooling of interests in soybean processing. One of the partners was Land-O-Lakes, which we MTL accumlators have heard of before. (Two wood refrigerator cars with that name were released in 1997 and 1998.) It's grown considerably since then, emcompassing more than 200 local and eight regional co-ops in a variety of different areas of agriculture. And anyone who's been around a track lately has probably seen one of their more than 900 covered hoppers, painted up in bright green. © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited. Given that, there's not much to do with respect to the ATP: MTL says the series was around from 1996, and the January 2002 ORER (a recent UMTRR addition) shows 297 cars in the series 96200 to 96499. According to an unrelated thread on the 'net, though-- and I mean unrelated because it's actually about an HO car-- the series has recently been taken over by Shippers Car Line with SHPX reporting marks and a renumber to six digits, adding a leading 4, as in SHPX 496314. In any case, the real ones I've seen looked pretty clean to me, so even for six year old cars, take it easy on the weathering. This is also perhaps the first time I've had to use "early 2000's" in my ATP, which looks a little weird. © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited. The MTL 93000 body style is based on an ACF CF4650 prototype, not a 5150, so there are going to be some differences. I pulled some key information for 5150's off the Trinity Rail and the ACF websites: length over strikers 55 feet 4 inches, truck centers 44 feet 4 1/4 inches, overall height 15 feet 6 inches. The MTL is a little shorter than that on all counts, but not by that much. The worst of it is the length, but even that's not all that far off. Whether that makes the model "wrong" is up to you. By the way, although the MTL car copy tags this as a Trinity, a photo reference of the real road number 96314 does seem to show "ACF Center Flow" among the lettering. © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
110050, $21.95 - 56 Foot General Service Tank Car, Great Northern. Lucky for me that the Great Northern was among the minority of roads that actually included its tank cars in its ORER listing. And so we have, in the January 1964 Register, the series numbered 100000 to 100049, with description "Oil Tank, Steel." That's a bit of an unusual way to put it. A notation adds that these cars had heater coils. They were also a bit longer than the MTL model, at 59 feet 2 inches, but that's "outside length" or over the couplers. So it's actually quite close to the MTL model on that score even though the 110er is billed as a "54 foot" car. Only a couple other dimensions are given including a capacity of 23,450 gallons or 200,000 pounds. There are all 50 present and accounted for in the roster. They're all still there in April 1970 when the Great Northern was folded into the Burlington Northern. © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited. Amazingly (at least to me), the BN kept reporting the Great Northern tankers in the April 1976 ORER, with 49 cars remaining in the series. The data disclosed was reduced farther, to the gallons and pounds capacity, the latter being trimmed to 188,000 pounds. By this time the BN tankcar number 875000, modeled as MTL catalog number 110040, had been added to the roster. By April 1981 the GN group had shrunk to 45. Believe it or not, there were still three cars on duty as late as July 1998, by which time the BN had yielded to the BNSF. I wouldn't vouch for the paint scheme lasting that long, though, especially the large roadname and herald. Could be that this car ended its service life in a black dip paint with reporting marks only. © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited. I did get a brief glimpse of a photo of this car in the Morning Sun Color Guide to GN Passenger and Freight Equipment, and overall the look and feel seems about right. I do note that the 110er body style is an ACF design and MTL says this car was made by GATX, so I wouldn't expect one hundred percent exactitude in the fidelity department. The various manufacturerers had to be at least a little different to avoid that ugly 'I' word-- infringement. © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited. N SCALE REPRINTS: 22182, $54.95 - A five-pack "30th Anniversary Special". This consists of the next five boxcars, all of which were first released almost 30 years ago. NOTE: This item has been sold out and discontinued. 20001, $9.40 - 40 Foot Single Door Boxcar (Youngstown or "Narrow Rib" Door), Dimensional Data. Part of 22182 30th Anniversary Set. Boxcar red with white lettering, but just the dimensional data typical from the 1940's to the 1970's (prior to the introduction of the consolidated stencil in 1974). Reporting Marks: None. Approximate Time Period: Late 1940's (1947 built date printed on car) to about whatever you want within reason. Previous Release: As catalog number 20000, starting in March 1973, in "tuscan" and "boxcar red" paint varieties. NOTE: This item has been sold out and discontinued. © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.This release is a throwback to thirty years ago, alright... a time when there were not quite as many boxcars made available, not even from the then Kadee. A solution to this which appeared on a number of Micro-Trains' early body styles was a car printed with only dimensional data. Just add the decals from your favorite roadname and you were on your way, with much less fuss. Multiple numbers for the same scheme? No problem, as long as your decal sheet enabled it. © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited. It seems to me, although I can't be completely sure, that the data reprinted on this reprint is the same as what appeared on the 1973 version of the car. That would give a build date of 5-47, or May 1947, and a reweigh date of 5-68, or May 1968. This suggests a car lettered later than 1947, as does the sans serif style of the lettering itself, almost what we'd call "Arial Narrow" in today's TrueType world. In the late forties, the stencil of choice was, with some exceptions, Railroad Roman which is a serif font. ("Serifs" are the little "tails" on the letters.) So while I call out '47 to "whatever" in the ATP, you might beg to differ, and you'd get no argument from me there. © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited. Because these cars were intended to be "used," the number of cars which remained in "mint condition" (following generally accepted definitions, and let's not go there right now) was probably pretty low. Add in the fact that no one knows how many were originally made and you have the recipe for all-time high bid prices in the stratosphere. The idea of $200 plus for a car that doesn't even have a roadname is probably quite amusing to many in the audience. I think it's fair to say that said highs have not been sustained more recently. I think you also need to add in that Kadee probably intended this to be a "stock item," like an undecorated, meaning that there were perhaps more manufactured than one might originally believe. We'll never know, though; all we know is that at some point "Dim Data" cars were discontinued, and they've been gone until now. © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
21030, $10.50 - 40 Foot Plug Door Boxcar, Missouri Pacific. It's pretty unusual for a plug door boxcar to carry a slogan referencing a railroad's passenger service. But in the mid fifties when this car arrived on the MoPac property, the line was still running the Texas Eagle, Colorado Eagle, Aztec Eagle, and Missouri River Eagle... and those are just the ones I found in a 1954 Official Guide of the Railways. (Better than any of those names in my opinion? The "Rainbow Special" between Kansas City and Hot Springs, Arkansas.) With the Eagles declining, the slogan was dropped starting in 1960, but the "Screaming Eagle" later returned, becoming part of the MP's logo in 1979 and staying there until the MP was absorbed into the Union Pacific. © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited. It's also pretty unusual for a plug door to be around in the mid fifties at all. This breakthrough in car design was just getting rolling, so to speak. If the build date listed on the car is good, this car just missed being pulled behind Missouri Pacific steam, the last of which was retired in 1955! The January 1959 ORER (Westerfield CD-ROM) shows a pretty short series of just 25, numbered 96000 to 96024, described as "Box, All Steel, Insulated" with AAR Classification XI. The inside length was 40 feet 1 inch, outside length 41 feet 10 inches, extreme height 15 feet 1 inch, door opening 8 feet (no door thing here, as that's what the 21000 body style has), capacity 100,000 pounds. With just 25 of these cars floating around you'd expect that I wouldn't find any pictures on the 'net, and you'd be correct, but I can tell you that the scheme on the 21030 follows that of the MoPac's sliding door boxcars of the period. © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited. The series had lost a car in the January 1964 ORER but had dropped off to just two cars in the April 1970 Register. The MP strikes me as being a little more timely with repainting than some other roads (BN? N&W?) so I'm not sure the "Eagles" were being displayed by then anyway. © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited. Moving back to the earlier release, "Words, no words, what's the difference?" Oh, a multiple of about five to ten the collector market. But even so, the first run of this release is apparently the real keeper. And what do the words say? "Forward in salt loading only. When empty return to Hutchinson Kansas." © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
22060, $11.95 - 40 Foot Combination Door Boxcar (Plug and Sliding Door, Youngstown or "Narrow Rib" sliding door), Rock Island. The Winter 2002 issue of the magazine "Classic Trains" celebrates the 100th anniversary of the debut of three famous "name trains," one of which, the "Golden State Limited", ran on the rails of the Rock Island Road. I had a chance to see part of the Golden State Route, now owned and operated by Union Pacific, in Texas and New Mexico in September 2002. The Rock Island handed over the Golden State to partner Southern Pacific at Santa Rosa, New Mexico, through which another American icon passed-- Route 66. (And the Golden State train lasted 66 years according to the CT article, how's that for a coincidence?) But east of there, the train belonged to the RI, including a straight arrow run between Guymon, Oklahoma and Denton, Texas, the second longest tangent in the United States at one time. Otherwise, though, the route wasn't as straight as the map indicated, and was actually seventy-plus miles longer than that of the rival Santa Fe's "Super Chief," so the Golden State crews really had to hustle. © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited. This iteration of the 22060 and the 1991 version both have a slight occurance of "not a reprint" versus the original, probably not enough to report it as such. The difference is principally in the dimensional data detail and the thickness of the large roadname. This particular version of the RI's boxcar paint scheme was adopted in the mid-1950's with the replacement of the "Route of the Rockets" slogan with the large roadname, and the shift to a white only herald versus the previous black and white. © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited. The January 1964 ORER shows the series 161350 to 161499, description "Box, All Steel, Staggered Doors, Plug Door" with AAR Classfication XM. A note adds: "Series... have 15 feet 0 inch side door opening with one 8 foot 0 inch sliding door and one 7 foot auxiliary plug door. Cars in this series are suitable for grain loading." Okay, so we have a "door thing" with the plug and sliding door being eight and six feet each for a total of 14 feet instead of fifteen. But the general look is okay for me. The rest of the key dimensions: inside length 40 feet 6 inches, outside length 41 feet 10 inches, extreme height 15 feet, capacity 100,000 pounds. There were 144 cars of a possible 150 in '64. © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited. In the April 1970 book, the group had been split into two parts. The larger group of 117 cars stayed at 100,000 pounds capacity, and a group of 22 more had been moved up to 110,000 pounds capacity. Of the numbers printed so far by MTL, only the 161462 had gone into this subclass. By the April 1976 book, you've got to be thinking roofwalk removal, and there are still 118 cars remaining so it's an element in the prototype equation. In that ORER it was called out right in the description that these were grain cars. By the April 1981 Register the Rock is gone, and so is its listing, creating the infamous "black hole" of freight car data that Rock Island modelers have to put up with. There's no real choice but to end the ATP there. © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
22180, $11.95 - 40 Foot Combination Door (Plug and Sliding Door, Youngstown or "Narrow Rib" sliding door) Boxcar, Milwaukee Road. Ah, it's one of those rare moments, when a reprint lets me "reprint" myself. I was doing the UMTRR in May 1997 when the previous iteration of this car was issued. Back then I mentioned that this was one of the few catalog numbers from the "early history" of Kadee that has never been changed. (The original catalog number scheme was, let's say, a little different than it is now.) I also blew through the ORERs and even mentioned that page 22 of the June 1993 issue of Rail Model Journal has a picture of car number 29155 from what is a nearly identical series of cars. That photo reveals a couple of minor-- and I do mean But we can't just rest on our laurels now, can we? So let's go once again to that January 1959 ORER, which was not in the UMTRR Research Accumulation back then. The series 29500 to 29999, of all 500 cars, carried the description "Box, All Steel" with AAR Classification XM. The inside length was 40 feet 5 inches, outside length 41 feet 10 inches, extreme height 15 feet 1 inch, capacity 100,000 pounds. The door opening of 15 feet 1 inch is futher explained in "Note MMM"-- and fair warning, if you don't like detail, the following quote is going to result in a splitting headache: "Cars in series... have all purpose commodity side doors... Sliding side door openings are 8 feet 0 inches wide by 9 feet 10 1/16 inch high. Plug door 7 feet 2 1/2 inches wide by 9 feet 9 3/8 inches high. Total clear door opening 15 feet 2 1/8 inches wide." The net of is that there is another "door thing" as the MTL plug and sliding doors are 8 and 6 feet each, but is it fair to try to model that exact set of proportions on a commercially available car? Yikes! "Good enough" may have to be good enough in this case!
© 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
I didn't yet have the January 1964 ORER in '97 either, when the series stood at 495 cars. I did have the April 1970 Register, where there were still 469 of the original 500 in service. The April 1976 lists 395 and the April 1981 has 182, but by those listings, again, the roofwalk or lack of it comes into play. The photo of the 29920 on Elwood's site was taken in 1968 and the roofwalk is still there, so you're good at least that long. © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
23020, $11.15 - 40 Foot Double Door Boxcar, Southern Pacific. From the first two numbers of this model to the 1993 reprint, there was a change from the black and white "circle and bar" herald to an all white one without the black background. This would technically make this run a "not a reprint" versus the original, but not versus the most recent previous run. What's a reviewer to do? What's the emoticon for "aaugh" ?
© 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
According to Lee Gatreaux's SP website Railgoat.Railfan.Net, the A-50-16 boxcars were built by Mount Vernon Car Company in 1947. By the Espee's designation, these are Automobile cars, of 50 tons capacity (the "50" isn't for "50 foot"). The ORER for July 1950 (Westerfield CD-ROM) shows the series 66175 to 66674, but wait! There are two groups, one of 428 cars described "Box" with AAR Classification "XM" and one of 70 cars described "Auto" with AAR Class "XAP". The difference? Well, apparently none dimensionally, which we'll get right back to. A notation states that it's what they carry: automobile engines, for which the XAP's are specially equipped. Oh. Okay. © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
Here are the vital stats: inside length 40 feet 6 inches, outside length 41 feet 10 inches, inside height 10 feet 6 inches, extreme height 15 feet 1 inch. There has to be a typo on the door opening: it's listed as 10 feet 7 inches. Let's try again... yes, that's better; the January 1959 Register pegs the door opening at 15 feet 1 inch, only 11 inches shorter than the model (or 0.06875 actual inch). My guess is that the prototype had a 7+8 foot door combination, but I did not come up with any photo evidence to support that speculation. The ATP ends right near that point, though, as a renumbering to the series 200588 to 201084 that was mentioned on Lee Gautreaux's site had taken place by January 1964. By this time the familiar large gothic roadname had taken the place of the circle and bar herald as well.
© 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
23080, $14.55 - 40 Foot Double Door Boxcar, Burlington Northern. This could almost be a sixth car in the 30th Anniversary special, having been first run contemporaneously with the other five cars listed above. I'll speculate that might have been the original intent, but the "all boxcar red" attribute of the official MTL 30 quintet was too good to pass up, and so you have this boxcar as a single. © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
But what you also have is a roofwalk. As I noted a couple of months back when the Z Scale BN 50 fifty foot boxcar debuted, I scoured the BN promotional movie "Portrait of a Railroad" (available on the "American Railroad Collection" on DVD and VHS from Pentrex) and the only thing that I saw with running boards were covered hoppers. Not that I didn't want to find them on house cars, but I didn't. The 1972 service date is after the official banning of roofwalks, but as we know that official banning didn't mean a whole lot. © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
The April 1976 ORER shows the series 198750 to 198999 at a pretty healthy 241 cars. The inside length was 40 feet 5 inches, outside length 44 feet 4 inches, extreme height 14 feet 10 inches. There is a minor "door thing" with the prototype at 15 feet and the two MTL 8 foot doors adding to 16 feet, but this is nothing to get worked up about. Capacity is 110,000 pounds. Description is about as generic as it can get: "Box." This group was already down to 202 units by the April 1981 ORER and just 76 pieces by October 1986, and was effectively gone by the end of the 1980's. © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
New Release: Based on what I can dig up on the 'net it looks like this car was painted just after the end of the "hopper brown" time period for GN gons. The prototype for the 106210 GN covered gondola in N Scale (released January 2001) was done up in 1960, also in red. © 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
The ORER for January 1959 (Westerfield CD-ROM) tells us that: the description is "Gondola, Mill, All Steel, Fixed Ends." Fixed ends? What? Well, it's easier to make a model drop end gon into a fixed end one than the opposite, Anyway, the series covers numbers 72800 to 72999, the inside length was 52 feet 6 inches, the outside length 54 feet 6 inches, the extreme height 7 feet 7 inches, and capacity 1995 cubic feet and 140,000 pounds. There were all 200 cars in the group at this point. By January 1964 this had slid to 147 pieces, but we also know that the Great Northern pulled some gons out of their existing series and gave them covers and new numbers (like the one modeled as the N Scale 106210). Looks like that's what may have happened: in April 1970 under the BN, the series remained relatively stable at 145 cars. There were still 142 in April 1976 and 110 in April 1981. I'd question whether the red paint was still in place by then, and if it was, how recognizable it would be given the abuse gondolas take over their lives. My guess is that it would have been repainted by then, perhaps in the "dip black" and minimal white stenciling that I've seen in photos of other GN gondolas. For the record, though, this number series doesn't appear to close out until the nineties; there were still ten cars hanging on in the October 1991 Register.
© 2002 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
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