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©2007 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting Prohibited. Trademarks are the property of their respective owners. Legal Stuff NOTE: This archive edition covers most single car releases only. Reviews of and commentary on most Micro-Trains locomotives, most Special Editions such as the U.S. Navy Sets and the Canadian Province & Territory cars are available exclusively in the e-mail subscription edition of the UMTRR. N SCALE NEW RELEASES:
025 00 470, $35.95
The Pan Am name has been around since about 1927, but the latest use of what was once a logo known the world over as the trademark of Pan American World Airways has become the rebranding of the Guilford companies, including the Guilford Rail System, to the Pan Am companies. This name change took place only about a year ago, in March 2006, and is noted in more detail in the "Pan Am Clipper" newsletter on the Pan Am Railways site. Pan Am painted boxcars and locomotives started showing up later in the year, which often resulted in the question, "Is this for real?"
© 2007 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
Well, yes, it is, well, let's say, legitimate and prototypical, and I have personally seen this car at least once. Can you tell I'm not a fan of this concept of using an airline trademark on a railroad car? By the way, Pan Am still operates an actual airline of sorts as well, having bought the shell of Pan Am World Airways out of bankruptcy in July 1998. Guilford also brought back Boston and Maine Airways in March 1999. Pan Am's airline business does scheduled service to and from secondary airports in the Northeast and to Sanford, Florida near Orlando, as well as charter business. No word on whether a "Minute Man" from the B&M has ended up on any planes, in a role reversal. Wouldn't B&M maroon and gold look good on a 727?
© 2007 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
It's been mostly Maine Central boxcars that have been rebranded at this point with the colorful and rather expensive scheme that varies based on the side of the car. It's possible that some of these cars started life in the orange and green "pine tree" scheme that was done by the then Kadee in July 1981 (catalog 25020, reprinted by MTL in March 1997), and then perhaps went to the later "Big G" scheme (025 00 440, November 2005).
© 2007 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
There's no ability to distinguish the branded from the rebranded in the Official Railway Equipment Register (ORER), but a quick lookup of the series in the January 2006 issue is in order. I can tell you that there were a selection of 5347 and 5272 cubic foot boxcars in the series 31900 to 32149, with 158 of the former and 75 of the latter, for a total of 233 cars or about a quarter of the total MEC fleet. (The MTL 025 body style is a model of the FMC 5077 cubic foot boxcar.)
© 2007 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
By the way, Pan Am still operates an actual airline of sorts as well, having bought the shell of Pan American World Airways out of bankruptcy in July 1998. Guilford also brought back Boston and Maine Airways in March 1999. Pan Am's airline business does scheduled service to and from secondary airports in the Northeast and to Sanford, Florida near Orlando, as well as charter business. No word on whether a "Minute Man" from the B&M has ended up on any planes, in a role reversal. Wouldn't B&M maroon and gold look good on a 727?
© 2007 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
065 00 570, $19.65
The Pittsburgh and Lake Erie Railroad was formed in 1870 but did not complete its line from Pittsburgh northwest to near Youngstown, Ohio until 1879. It was already in the orbit of William Henry Vanderbilt's empire at that point, and although it eventually became wholly owned by the New York Central and the Penn Central after that, it was operated as an independent subsidiary. It in turned owned the Pittsburgh, McKeesport and Youghiogheny which extended to Connellsville and connection with the B&O and Western Maryland, also part of the "South Penn" scheme to undermine the Pennsylvania's hold on that state. When the Penn Central was folded into Conrail-- 31 years ago this month!!!-- the P&LE became independent for the first time in nearly 100 years. But the steel trade which helped make the line "The Little Giant" was a fraction of what it once was and the P&LE struggled on its own. CSX purchased the line outright in 1993; it and its predecessors had been using it going back to the days of the Baltimore and Ohio. And the P&LE became a fallen flag. The Pittsburgh & Lake Erie Railroad Historical Society can be of more help here.
© 2007 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
Since company service cars could and often did last for decades, we have to go to the more "strictly speaking" criteria to glean an Approximate Time Period. (No ORER assistance here, I'm afraid.) The jade green of the Penn Central was introduced in 1968, of course, and the New York Central style lettering could have been used earlier than that. But the presence of the U-1 wheel stencil would put this car into circa 1978 or so. I think I read a "5-78" as the shop or reweigh date, it could be "5-79" as well. That seems to place the ATP start in the late seventies; where it ends is anybody's guess, but I think the CSX takeover would be a reasonable assumption pending the absence of any other information.
© 2007 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
099 00 040, $18.35
Perhaps one of the oldest cars in my father's HO Scale accumulation is a Varney single dome tank car lettered for the Archer-Daniels-Midland Company. In dark blue with white lettering if I recall correctly, it was one of my favorites and it somehow found its way out of the box and onto my dad's layout on a regular basis. I had no particular attachment to the company lettered on the side of the car; hey, I didn't even know what it did. I just thought the car was attractive. I wonder how many buying decisions are still made on that basis alone. Certainly some of mine are.
© 2007 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
And that may be the case for this latest entry in the Evans covered hopper series from MTL. Now known as ADM, the company is "one of the world’s largest agricultural processors of soybeans, corn, wheat and cocoa." This straight from the website. "We work with farmers across the world to turn these crops into soymeal and oil, corn sweeteners, flour, cocoa and chocolate, ethanol and biodiesel, as well as a wide portfolio of other value-added food ingredients, animal nutrition and industrial products." And by the way, the official name of the company is still Archer-Daniels-Midland. It's been that way since 1923, when the Midland Linseed Products Company was acquired by the linseed crushing business of George Archer and John Daniels. I was a bit skeptical about that "molecule" logo being designed way back in 1962, but the official website does confirm this. In fact, the MTL car copy largely comes from the history timeline on the ADM site. And the first chemist in the employ of the firm was hired back in 1923.
© 2007 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
My first question about this car was, as you might expect, a bit of trivia: if the company is ADM, where is that "UELX" reporting mark from? According to a citation on rrpicturearchives.net, it would be United Equipment Leasing Associates. No, I haven't heard of it either. It was in ORERs from July 1977 to 1988 and the reporting marks were conveyed to ADM Transportation Company after that. I guess ADM liked the lessor so much, they bought the company. Acquisition is one of their growth strategies.
© 2007 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
Freight Cars Journal Issue 41, which has a production roster of all the Evans 4780 covered hoppers, shows a group UELX 60110 to 60134 as being built in 1979 and possibly acquired secondhand in 1980, and UELX 60135 to 60254 as built during 1980. Then there are UELX 65000 to 65149 built in 1979 for ADM and Tabor Grain, which appears to be part of ADM anyway.
© 2007 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
I'll grab a sample ORER, this one from April 1984 (a recent addition to the Research Accumulation). All three groups noted above have identical dimensions with one exception, namely: inside length 54 feet 1 inch, inside width 10 feet, inside height not given, outside length 59 feet 9 inches, extreme height 15 feet 1 inch, capacity 4780 cubic feet. The weight capacity is where there's the difference: the series we're most interested in is of 190,000 pounds while the other two top out at 200,000 pounds. All possible cars are in place in each series.
© 2007 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
Knowing that there are contemporary photos available, I jumped right to the January 2006 Register from there. Yes, we're definitely "to present" based on that book, with 23 of 25 cars left from 60110 to 60134, 91 of 115 from 60135 to 65149 and 110 of 150 from 65000 to 65149 for a total of 224 if my math is correct. All three groups are listed with a Gross Rail Weight (car plus lading) of 263,000 pounds. ADM Transportation had an impressive 5178 cars in service in the listing under seven different reporting marks of which the expected "ADMX" was the largest in cars listed.
© 2007 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
A very dirty and rusty-- almost to the point of unreadable lettering-- UELX 60112 appears on rrpicturearchives.net as pictured in September 2005. How rusty and dirty is it? Well, were it not for the ends of this car, it would be hard to tell that the original paint color was blue! The paint scheme-- well, what's left of it, anyway-- is a bit different, with the ADM initials next to the molecule symbol and across three separate panels. It appears from other photos that there are other choices for ADM cars in this group as well. For example, the previous car in the series, UELX 60175, is in gray with black and blue lettering and the caption "ADM Milling Company." I can't tell from the photo whether the trucks are black or blue; the MTL car copy says black but the car photo shows blue trucks. (We'll need to await any Incremental Information on this.) Two numbers over, the UELX 60178 is in gray with the same arrangement of lettering as the MTL model. Both these cars were photographed in 2007.
© 2007 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
Ah, but our trusty friend the Fallen Flags site has a sharp looking UELX 60176 in an undated (rats!) photo intransit through Cleveland, Ohio all in the blue and white that MTL selected. And then there's the UELX 60201 which is in blue and carries the "ADM Milling Company" caption as well. I may be able to give you at least the late 1980's for the blue paint, though, as Fallen Flags also has UELX 60116 in blue in a photo from 1987 with that different placement of the ADM initials as on the rusty dusty UELX 60112 cited above.
© 2007 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
105 00 560, $18.15
Pullman-Standard built trainloads of cars for the Atlantic Coast Line, and a number of them are pictured in the Morning Sun Color Guide to Pullman-Standard. Unfortunately, this series of 505 cars is not in those honored with a picture. I wouldn't be surprised to see them in the MSCG to the ACL, though. Anyone with Incremental Information is more than welcome to contribute for next time. MTL notes that these were the last gons built for the ACL, and the fact that they're not in the January 1964 ORER seems to support that.
© 2007 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
The next Register I have is April 1970, and those of you who've been with me for a while know that the Seaboard Coast Line's entries, post-merger, are a bit maddening. The original ACL listing is in place with zero cars shown and the corresponding SCL entry has all of the car count, whether the repainting or relettering has actually been done. That makes the Time Period Approximate indeed! Well, let's see what we can do nonetheless. The ACL series 98400 to 98904 was described as "Gondola, All Steel, Fixed Ends" with AAR Classification GB which is your basic designation for the car type. These had inside length of 52 feet 6 inches, inside height of 3 feet 6 inches, outside length of 57 feet 1 inch, extreme height of 7 feet 1 inch, and capacity of 1743 cubic feet or 154,000 pounds. This ACL group flipped to SCL 698400 to 698904 (change ACL to SCL and drop a 6 in front of the number) and 504 cars are shown in that group.
© 2007 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
So when did the ACL stop appearing on this group? The Register notes state that the original series won't be removed until the last car is renumbered. So all I should have to do is comb through the ORER Library to find the first edition I have without the ACL group of gons. And that would be... uh, inconclusive.
© 2007 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
For we get all the way through the SCL listings and land in the April 1984 ORER where the Seaboard System listing the quantities of cars under the original reporting marks is restored. Anyone want to guess how many of these cars were still in ACL paint and lettering out of the initial 505? Fifty, maybe? Perhaps one hundred? How about 456?!? Oh, and just 23 were relettered to "SCL". Just what were those painters and stencillers doing all that time? Certainly not tending to these gondolas. Perhaps they were too busy working hard for the ACL-- and its next two successors.
© 2007 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
No, make that next three successors. The CSX Transportation entry in the July 1987 ORER shows 248 cars in the original ACL series, by far the largest group of survivors not yet repainted from the Atlantic Coast Line that had become a Fallen Flag twenty years before. But they were almost all gone from the ACL roster as of my next Register, July 1989, with just two remaining. I don't think they were retired; perhaps moved directly to CSXT paint.
© 2007 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
Hey, with that kind of a lifespan, I thought, maybe there will be one on the 'net after all. Yes, there is, a very, very, beat up ACL 98496 in what looks nothing like the original paint even in a blurry shot that appears to be a still from a video dated March 2000, this on Fallen Flags. And then there's ACL 98651 as shot in 2006 (!) looking quite smallish next to a newer CSXT model and again looking quite worn out. Finally, vestiges of the original Atlantic Coast Line lettering on the right of the car remain on ACL 98719 as caught in 2006. (Yes, I know this is three gons from the group captured after the date at which the ORER says there are only two. Go figure.) Despite these outliers, I think I'll leave the ATP where it is.
© 2007 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
121 00 030, $12.50
If you were to go to, say, RRPictureArchives.net, to get a sense of the current roster of Union Pacific's scale test cars, you'd probably be surprised. The majority of the cars pictured are... tank cars? Yep! Weighted to the proper amount to test the scales. For example, how about UP 903024 and 903025, which are tank cars of something like 60 feet in length, stenciled "Scale Monitor Car". Wait, let me change that period to a "?!?". UP 903037 is another somewhat shorter tanker, stenciled in great big capital letters, "No Unauthorized Repairs" with a contact name in the Union Pacific Scales Department. There are clearly some advantages to using these cars to test scales; for one thing, they can go right over the hump in classification yards, based on photos on the RRPA site. Either they can, or someone is SO fired, that is.
© 2007 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
There are a couple of cars that look like flat cars with small sheds on them, closer, but still not quite the MTL model. And yes, there is one lone ranger... I mean, scale test car more like what we've been seeing, the UP 903147, in silver paint, as lensed in Fort Worth in 2006.
© 2007 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
All this is certainly mildly interesting at least (I hope!) but it doesn't really get us anywhere with respect to the car Micro-Trains has actually released. No worries, though. Several UMTRR Gang Members including Richie on "The Railwire" and David Carnell pointed out a photo of the real UP 03145 as of 1956 in the Morning Sun Color Guide to the Union Pacific, Volume 2, Page 103. The grays and yellows look good, yes even the couplers. Richie noted that the underframe was also gray and will need some touching up. The MTL car is a nice match to the actual 03145.
© 2007 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
Another photo in the same MSCG (Page 104) from 1959 shows another UP scale test car, the 03147, acquired from the Pennsylvania that would be more of a "stand in" with respect to the model. It's in silver with red details and black lettering; I've been told that the UP went over to silver for maintenance of way equipment about that time. Using the caboose paint schemes as a proxy, those being painted in Armour Yellow starting in 1947 according to the RPI site, I think we have to bound the ATP from there and include the decade of the 1950's.
© 2007 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
031 00 060, $19.45
The Morning Sun Color Guide to the Northern Pacific shows... wait, not so fast there. This car isn't in the MSCG. Rats. But there is a caption that applies to the group in the book, and I'll quote that: "Although double door 50 foot cars were more versatile than single door 50 foot cars in the Northwest, the NP built 500 single door cars in 1950 as series 31000 to 31499. Almost immediately, some of them were spirited away into green paint and DF service, but the others were well employed in general merchandise service." And eighteen years after they were built, some of these cars were outshopped in a paint scheme that you might already have in your accumulation of MTL cars, namely, the sharp red, white and blue "Savings Bonds" scheme. Without a roofwalk, however. Fallen Flags shows a few of those and also the 31092 from the same group in a "large NP" scheme, also without roofwalk, but alas, none to be seen in this "as delivered" scheme. We get oh so close with an image of NP 31476 from February 1981 on "Boxcars and Freight Cars of North America", but that's a later scheme with a larger NP "monad" herald. Come to think of it, the use of that larger herald, which dates to 1953, could help define the Approximate Time Period; it would then be a little shorter than we might first think. I will call it at the early 1960's but I think it would be tough to prove they didn't last a little longer than that.
© 2007 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
Well, if no photos, there's always the ORER. The January 1953 edition shows 499 cars in the series with the following dimensions: inside length 50 feet 6 inches, inside height 10 feet 6 inches, outside length 51 feet 11 inches, extreme height 15 feet 1 inch, door opening 8 feet, and capacity 4882 cubic feet or 100,000 pounds. 499 cars was a lot but still only a fraction of the more than 36,000 cars the NP had in service then. That comment in the MSCG about cars being taken for DF service seems to be supported by the count of only 295 cars in the January 1964 ORER. How about, for example, the 195 cars numbered 1100 to 1295 and of the same general dimensions as these cars? Hmm.
© 2007 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
This fourth number in the MTL list of releases sports an interior load, which may lead to another update of the page on the UMTRR site with this fourth load. And of course, some experimentation as to whether it will fit into any of the other MTL boxcars. So far, we know that the first three loads (January, April and July 2006) can fit in the 40 foot steel boxcars, but not the wood sided cars. We also know that interior loads help sell out cars quickly, so you've been cautioned on this one.
© 2007 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
103 00 050, $22.90
Well, maybe it hasn't been a dog's age, but it has been August 2004 since the previous release of this body style (the Milwaukee Road reprint, 103040). This is an interesting choice for a reprint since it's hard to get much plainer than this reporting marks only entry. Back when the first release of the car was issued, MTL stated that this release set "a new benchmark for prototypical accuracy with highly detailed and prolific reporting data." Unfortunately for the paint department, all that data has to fit into the spaces between all those "waffles" on the side of the car, and even on the "waffles." Eight years later, I think MTL's claim still holds up pretty well, certainly in terms of modern equipment.
© 2007 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
We'll take a trip to the "Priest Book" ("Santa Fe Freight Cars in Color, Volume One Box Cars") for three views of the Bx-187 class of Santa Fe boxcars, including two that at least have a herald... OK, never mind. The ATSF 37572 is shown in the exact paint scheme as MTL did. Twenty-five of the Bx-187s were built by Berwick Forge and Fabricating in 1978 and numbered 37562 to 37586. They originally appeared with a large circle cross, such as that shown on MTL's other release from this group, catalog 103030 from August 1998. So the ATP doesn't start at the build date. The photo of the plain 37572 is from 1988.
© 2007 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
In the January 1991 ORER the group is already down four to 21 pieces, with the same number in place in 1996. That was as far as I could get in 1999, but I can go forward now to the April 1999 Register and the BNSF listing. There are still 21 there as well, broken into nine different subsets by weight capacity. Let's pull the vital statistics: inside length 60 feet 9 inches, inside width 9 feet 2 inches, inside height 13 feet 2 inches, outside length 67 feet 9 inches, extreme height 17 feet, door opening 16 feet, capacity varying from 7167 to 7315 cubic feet and from 162,000 to 164,000 pounds. The weight changes are typical but the cubic foot variations are unusual. Could be that the interior equipment differed enough to change those numbers even though the description across all subsets is the same, namely, "Box, DF Belts, Shock Control, Nailable Steel Floor, 50K (Auto Parts)."
© 2007 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
My proxy for "the present" is the January 2006 ORER, and fourteen cars remain in ATSF lettering and in service according to that book. I'd speculate that thanks, or no thanks, to the "artists" along the line, there is more than just plain white lettering on these cars these days, and boy would I like to be wrong on that count. It is also possible that a more official small circle cross or even a "Q" logo was added to the mix, as shown in another photo in the Priest Book. A quick decal job would yield that for you.
© 2007 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
History lesson: Why is Connecticut called "The Constitution State"? Well, many historians say that "The Fundamental Orders of Connecticut" written in 1639 was the first document that set down the type of government that was to be established; in essence, a constitution, which led to The Constitution. Prior to that were First Nations such as the Mohegan, the Pequot, the Niantic and several branches of the Algonquin. The first Europeans to land in the area were Dutch circa 1614 who sailed up what is now the Connecticut River to near what is now Hartford. The Dutch were also the first from Europe to settle there though they were quickly dominated by English coming from Massachusetts and elsewhere. Hartford was founded in 1636; it was quite amazing to wander through a cemetery near its center and see not one but many grave markers from several hundred years ago. Not far from there is the site of the Charter Oak, where the colony's charter was said to have been hidden after a royal representative came over from England in 1687 to confiscate it. The real Charter Oak lasted until August 1856 when it fell in a storm.
© 2007 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
Ah, yes, those British. They so enraged the citizenry that Governor Trumbull was the only one of the thirteen to actively support the American Revolution. Both General Israel Putnam ("Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes!") and Nathan Hale ("I regret that I have but one life to lose for my country") were from Connecticut. But England was pretty outraged in turn by the burgeoning industrial economy that was quick to expand in a colony, then state that lacked much land (it's larger in land area than only Delaware and Rhode Island).
© 2007 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
Here are a few other key events in the history of the state. Yale was founded as "Collegiate School" in 1701. For you fellow journalists, the Connecticut Courant, now the Hartford Courant, was founded in 1764 and is the oldest continuously published newspaper in the United States. Eli Whitney came up with the concept of interchangeable parts after securing a government contract for-- no, not the cotton gin, but muskets. In 1806 Noah Webster published an abbreviated version of his first American Dictionary, which was output in full with 60,000 entries in 1828. Captain Nathaniel Palmer of Stonington discovered the continent of Antarctica in 1820. The first life insurance company was founded in Hartford in 1841. The Connecticut Mutual Life Insurance Company was followed by Phoenix, Aetna, Travelers, and Connecticut General all by 1861. And here I thought "Aetna" was one of those modern made-up names... oh, yeah, there's Mount Aetna (Etna) in Sicily, isn't there? The first US Navy submarine (1900) and the world's first atomic sub (1954) were built there. In 1901, the first speed limit law for automobiles was enacted; despite the presence of numerous "police packs" I've witnessed on Interstates there, said speed limits are regularly flaunted, including by David Letterman.
© 2007 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
There's a nice site "Connecticut History Online" and within its pages is an essay "Steam on Rail and Land". There it's noted that in 1837, the first rail line in Connecticut was completed from Stonington to Providence, Rhode Island. By the Civil War, the state had the highest railroad density in the country and "in the mid-1870s, the newly merged New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad was the most prosperous and dominant commercial enterprise in New England." One hundred years later... no. Let's just say that. Replacing many of the factories were other concerns, including insurance, especially around Hartford. And the First Nations have reclaimed some of their territory, at least in terms of visibility, with the Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun casinos and resorts in the eastern part of the state. I traveled to Mohegan Sun on my last visit to the state and was quite overwhelmed by its size and luxury. However, I don't play any game of chance that I can't understand, which eliminates most slot machines these days. How does one get that many lines on which to win out of a three by five matrix anyway?
© 2007 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
While I can tell you of the last visit to the Constitution State, I can't exactly pinpoint my first setting foot. It might have been while on the train to Boston that I mentioned when the Massachusetts car was released. But the most likely official reach was during a Summer swing through the various trolley museums and other attractions like Old Saybrook and Mystic Harbor, which would have been in the late 1970's. My brother and I made a cassette recording of highlights of this trip, which we called "The Connecticut Tapes" and is probably still around somewhere in my parents house.
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Famous folks from Connecticut include: Well, there was Nathan Hale, but there was also Benedict Arnold (Norwich); Samuel Colt, inventor of the revolver; P.T. Barnum, who was a founder of the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus, associated with but perhaps never said "There's a sucker born every minute" and also found on a United States Commemorative Coin (the Bridgeport Centennial, 1936, thus perhaps proving the above statement was right); Ella Grasso, first woman governor of any state; Charles Goodyear, inventor of vulcanized rubber; actress Katherine Hepburn; champion ice skater Dorothy Hamill; author Harriet Beecher Stowe ("Uncle Tom's Cabin"); Edwin Land, inventor of the Polaroid camera; finance and rail barons C. P. Huntington and J. Pierpoint Morgan; designer Frederick Law Olmsted; and photographer Annie Leibovitz whose prints of celebrities are well known. And speaking of "prints," I can't leave out those of the early Jurassic found in the Dinosaur Museum in Rocky Hill; it's one of the largest sets of fossil tracks preserved anywhere and Kieran thought it was very cool!
© 2007 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
Reprint:
I'll bet you can't come up with another railroad within the current boundaries of the United States that was chartered by royalty! Well, this is one: it was the King Kalakaua of Hawaii who signed the charter in September 1888 for the Oahu Railway and Land Company. A bit over a year later, the line was in operation from Honolulu west nine miles to Aiea. The operation was to enable the transportation of sugar cane from the west side of the island, and it did that and more, its main line reaching 71 track miles and more than halfway around the coast of the island of Oahu to Kahuku. Had things worked out, the OR&L might have completely encircled the island; as it was, it was a profitable operation into World War II when it also became a valuable defense asset. In 1908 an upgrade of the line was made; according to George Hilton in the book "American Narrow Gauge Railroads," this project "undoubtedly would have entailed conversion [to standard gauge] if the railway had been in the continental United States." It did become the only slim gauge line to utilize automatic block signals. In 1916 the road operated more than 650 freight cars! If only these were listed in the ORER; being quite isolated from other stateside railroads, it might have qualified as a common carrier but certainly not an interchange partner. So we won't have any comparisons of the 326 model to its prototype unless I receive or come up with some Incremental Information and I am going with the MTL car copy for the ATP. Perhaps Approximate Place would be more appropriate here anyway.
© 2007 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
MTL says that this line was dissolved in the 1950's, and that's somewhat accurate. After World War II, business dried up quickly and a tsunami cut off the northern portion of the mainline. The line was mostly abandoned in 1947 except for some switching business in and around Honolulu as the Oahu Railway and Terminal Warehouse Company until 1972. The Navy picked up some trackage for itself and the rest of the route was given back to Hawaii for highways after the new state's Attorney General demanded that it be returned under the terms of the original royal charter! Back in 1991 when Rosemary and I visited the island as part of our honeymoon, a rental car map specifically noted that I was forbidden to drive the unpaved road out to Kaena Point, the westernmost tip of Oahu. If I had known that that road might have once been the right of way of the Oahu Railway and Land Company, including a 19 degree curve to turn from the northwest to the northeast, I might have been more tempted to take that Mustang convertible out there... well, maybe not.
© 2007 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
In December 2002 when the second road number for this car was released, I noted that a tourist operation called the Hawaiian Railway was operating a six mile portion of the former line. That organization's site is still in place and it's part of the National Railway Historical Society; although the pages appear to have not been updated since 2005; I hope it's still operating trains, however infrequently. Maybe a field trip to find out? I know my daughter Thalia Elizabeth would approve as she's been asking how much it costs to go!
© 2007 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
510 00 170, $19.95
After the McGuiness "B&M", but before the Guilford "G," there was this relatively basic paint scheme. The Boston and Maine was never what you'd call spectacularly successful in the second half of the 20th Century, so new car acquisitions were kept to what was absolutely necessary. Paper hauling? Now that would be absolutely necessary. And so this group of cars joined the roster as the seventies closed.
© 2007 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
My April 1981 ORER shows the series 80000 to 80024, of 25 cars. They were AAR Class XP, listed as "Box, Steel, Cushioned Underframe, Designed for Special Loading (Newsprint Service), Not For General Use." An inside length of 50 foot 6 inches was called out, with an outside length of 59 feet 1 inch! Whoa! Gotta find those "really really extended" draft gear trucks again! There aren't any such things in Z Scale, at least not yet, but one could body mount MTL's couplers outboard of the body to simulate this. I'm assuming this works; it does for me in N Scale. The inside height of these cars was 10 feet 11 inches, inside width 9 feet 6 inches, extreme height 15 feet 3 inches, door opening 10 feet, and capacity 5272 cubic feet or 154,000 pounds. The January 1985 Register gets into more detail on the extra outside length, listing a "20 Inch Travel Keystone Cushion Underframe."
© 2007 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
Skip to the October 1996 ORER, where 3 of the remaining 24 cars are stripped of the full description but retain the XP designation. Those three, the 80023 not one of them, also have different capacities from the then 185,000 pounds of the rest of the group. But all the cars in the 80000s are gone by the January 2002 Register. You might already know that you'll need to add a "little" bit of weathering if you want to operate this car on your Y2K-set pike. The last time I'd seen a prototype for this car, it was hard to tell where the black door ended and the blue sides began. By the way, the total number of cars listed for the B&M dropped from 3217 all the way down to 608 during the Approximate Time Period of this car, another "soft metric" of how things were going for the line.
© 2007 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
Fallen Flags has a shot of the previous car in the series, the 80022, as lensed in April 1987 and a nice three-quarter view of the car before that, 80021, in Bucksport, Maine in November 1991. There are photos of the same general paint scheme on the NERAIL New England Railroad Photo Archive but none of this particular series. (I do note a contribution there by our own Rich Roberg of "a real bang up job" on one of the other B&M x-post boxcars... also called "Customized by Crash!" by one of my friends.) While the MTL model is an FMC car as was the prototype series, the cubic footage is a little different, 5077 versus 5272, so the measurements will be a little off-- a very little off in the case of 1:220th actual size. As I used to say more often, rivet, rivet...
© 2007 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
511 00 040, $20.35
[Note: This commentary is largely reprinted from the review of the N Scale release of this car from November 1999.]
MTL states in its car copy that that "The NS stenciled individual car assignments on its freight cars for ownership reference." That's a more interesting comment than it might seem at first. While the merger of the Norfolk and Western and Southern Railway systems into the Norfolk Southern took place officially in 1982, the roads continued to be listed separately in the ORER until at least 1989! And speaking of ORERs... well, I'm going to get off cheap on this commentary, because just telling the story of the tracings through those books is going to consume all of the space I allotted for this car!
© 2007 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
We start in 1981, when these cars were built, and within the Southern Railway System listing we find series 584824 to 584999, of 176 cars: "Box, Insulated, Plug Doors, Cushion Underframe, Pallets" given AAR designation XPI. They're of 52 foot 6 inch inside length and are 60 foot 9 inches over the couplers; the outside length of the model is a bit short but the inside length is right on. Other vital statistics: inside height 10 feet 6 inches, extreme height 15 feet 6 inches, door opening 12 feet (a "door thing"? Harder to tell on plug doors) and capacity 5237 cubic feet or 154,000 pounds. As MTL notes, there were 176 cars built and that's how many are listed in the April 1981 entry. Then it gets really interesting.
© 2007 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
In the October 1986 book, still under the Southern, there are no less than 14 separate sublistings for the cars in the 584824 to 584899 series! They are split by AAR designation into the XPI and the RB -- or, refrigerator-- classifications, and within each of those there are the more typical capacity groupings. This month's offering just about has its own listing, with 584899 called out as a "Box, Steel" (what happened to the rest of the qualifiers?) with AAR code XPI and 141,000 pounds capacity. Repeat this in the July 1989 edition. By July 1992, the Norfolk Southern merger had at least taken hold to the point of a combined ORER listing, but still under SOU reporting marks, the 584899 remains with the XPI code and the 141,000 pounds capacity. At this point, by the way, there were so many splits of the original 176 car series by type and capacity that I didn't bother to count or add the number of cars that were left. There's only some much attention that can be paid to a given release!
© 2007 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
Some semblance of order did return in the October 1996 book, I'm happy to say. The series was reconsolidated (is that a word?) into two major groupings. There were 56 cars of the RBL class, which were once again described as "Box, Insulated, Plug Doors, Cushion Underframe, Pallets". And there were 54 more cars listed as just "Box, Steel" that kept the XPI code. The 584899 is not listed specifically in either of these groups. I'm not ready to say that those cars were gone but I am cutting the ATP off just to be typically conservative. My sense is that you can keep going through the rest of the 1990's without eyebrows being raised.
© 2007 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
520 00 130, $23.15
The Oregon Short Line was one of the several subsidiary roads that were part of the earlier Union Pacific System. (The "pre-Borg" one.) According to the map in my April 1928 ORER, OSL trackage extended north of Ogden, Utah and Granger, Colorado into Idaho, with a bunch of secondary lines, but into the actual state of Oregon only as far as Huntington, with a branch to Burns. Most of the Oregon trackage was listed as being "OWR&N," the Oregon-Washington Railway and Navigation Company." My May 1954 Official Guide shows all of this trackage labeled "Union Pacific," reflecting the interest in showing UP as one system. But not so fast there! According to Don Strack's "Short History of Mergers of the Union Pacific", found on the site of the Union Pacific Historical Society (page no longer available online), the OSL wasn't officially absorbed into the UP until December 1987! Volume 1, Number 1 of that organization's publication "The Streamliner" covers Livestock Dispatch Stock Cars, by the way.
© 2007 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
The first ORER I own that shows this number series of cars is the January 1940 edition; they are not in the July 1935 book so we've got it a bit narrowed down. However, recall that MTL gives a build date of May 1926, rebuild date of September 1934 and repaint date of January 1947 for these cars, so ORERs can be deceiving in this case. And also please note that Incremental Information supplied to UMTRR HQ after the release of the N Scale UP stock car in "synthetic red" in November 2006 indicates that roller bearing cars got yellow paint after 1950. (A "truck thing"? The MTL car has friction bearing Bettendorf trucks.) So that ATP would be too wide. A descriptive blurb for an S Helper Service model of the S-40-10 cars that I found online says that these were rebuilt from 1916 era boxcars "into both single and double deck cars and were the first to wear the famous UP Armour Yellow and silver paint scheme." A shot of that model car shows numerous deltas to the MTL model which isn't surprising since (as I point out just about every time MTL does a stock car) their body style is based on a New York Central prototype as are other N Scale models.
© 2007 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
The net of it is that we most likely need to stick to the fifties as the start of our ATP. (Although the index to the above mentioned "Streamliner" indicates a photo of a yellow and black S-40-10 from 1947.) Alright, then; the July 1950 ORER shows 251 cars in the series 47700 to 47999, with 40 foot 7 inch inside length, 9 foot 2 inch inside height, 42 foot 2 inch outside length, 14 foot 1 inch extreme height, a 6 foot door opening, and capacity of 3292 cubic feet or 80,000 pounds. This number had dropped down to just 47 cars in the set by January 1964's ORER; but they were still lettered "OSL". That was about to change: Note D for the listing stated that all OSL lettered cars were in process of being relettered "UP". And so much for the Approximate Time Period.
© 2007 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
A photo of OSL 48216 in the Morning Sun Color Guide to the UP (a new addition to the Research Accumulation) is not of the series we're looking at, but provides some interesting information nonetheless. The caption notes that OSL lettering was used for UP equipment trust purposes, and also that there were plans to rebuild 350 older stock cars starting in 1947. Only 51 got that treatment, and in fact that number is shown in the July 1950 ORER numbered in the 48000 to 48349 group.
© 2007 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
522 00 140, $21.10
Ian Cranstone's "Canadian Freight Cars" site shows the cars in the series 143500 to 144999 as being delivered between March and July 1952 from builder ECC. That's Eastern Car Company out of Trenton, Nova Scotia. The "wet noodle" herald was introduced after that, so this isn't the original paint scheme on these cars. The March 1963 shop date given by MTL could certainly have corresponded to the repainting date, but we can sneak back a couple of years before that since that CN logo came along in 1961.
© 2007 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
Ian also shows this series as mostly renumbered to 146000 to 146999, 147108 to 147437 and 459200 to 459358, so discerning when that happened is a major link to our Approximate Time Period. Fortunately, Ian helps with that as well: the 146's were starting in 1968 but mostly after 1971; the 147's were beginning in 1969 and the 459's were back in 1962, where they were flipped to wood chip service and redesignated to the AAR Classification LP. Most of the series went to the 146's, with 1300 cars eventually being in that group.
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Before all this occurred, the January 1964 ORER showed the original series 143500 to 144999 described as "Gondola, Steel, Fixed Sides, Drop Ends, Wood Floor" with AAR Classification GB and these dimensions: inside length 52 feet 6 inches, inside height 4 feet, outside length 55 feet, extreme height 7 feet 9 inches, and capacity 1996 cubic feet or 155,000 pounds. There were 1364 cars in the group at that time.
© 2007 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
July 1968 is the date of the photo of the real CN 143722 as found in the Morning Sun Color Guide to the CN (Volume 1). It was in Clemina, British Columbia, and--get this-- it was photographed with a load of logs, not unlike the load that is included with the MTL car! Yes, the stakes, themselves narrow diameter branches, enable the piling of logs to more than twice the height of the car. And no, I don't see anything other than that holding them in, including guarding against the possibility of end to end shifts in the lading. There certainly are logs "sticking out" at both ends of the car. That could make things, er, interesting, were the car to be suddenly stopped. Also on Page 61 of the MSCG are examples of the previous paint scheme with the roadname across the side, which, perhaps, we'll see at some point.
© 2007 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
New Release:
I was a bit confused about this release at first, given that the Micro-News car copy says the sides are yellow. But the website car copy matches the photo images, indicating yellow sides, not brown (OK, freight car red) ones, and also notes the circular trademark scheme starting in 1927. The lettering is identical to the first run of this car (850 00 01x, April 2006), which did have yellow sides.
© 2007 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
I have to assume that just because I can't find any 'net based photographic evidence of freight car red reefers being on the C&S roster does NOT mean they didn't exist. We are talking something like seventy years ago here, and I will be the first to tell you that I am not a narrow gauge expert, or even a novice for that matter. (As in, I don't even know enough to be dangerous.) We'll beg and plead for some Incremental Information here, and in the meantime recap the ORER information from the April 2006 debut release of this body style and perhaps add a byte or two.
© 2007 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
Conveniently near the start of this ATP is the Official Railway Equipment Register (ORER) for April 1928, which we'll go to. Of the total of 895 narrow gauge freight cars listed in the C&S registration are 25 refrigerator cars, of which 20 belong to the series 1100 to 1119. The inside length of these cars was just 23 feet, but that's between the ice tanks which carried 5712 pounds of chunk ice or 4896 pounds of chunk ice. The inside height was 6 feet and one-half inch, which means I could have just stood upright inside!-- and the inside width was 6 feet 7 inches. The outside length was 30 feet even, outside width was 7 feet 11 1/2 inches and the extreme height was 12 feet. The July 1935 edition of the ORER showed a drop to 18 cars in the reefer series in which we are interested, which makes sense since we know some C&S cars were sold to the Rio Grande Southern. But the next ORER I have is the July 1940, and by then it was all over for the narrow gauge operations of the line although the standard gauge from Denver southward to the sister line Fort Worth and Denver was doing just fine.
© 2007 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
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