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©2008 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, Passenger Cars, Runner Packs, 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. © 2008 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited. N SCALE NEW RELEASES:
031 00 076, $38.65
Please refer to the April 2008 UMTRR (e-mail and website versions) for a discussion of the C&O Cameo Car series.
031 00 370, $28.65
This car is a lesson on how the Official Railway Equipment Register (ORER) is comprehensive but not always complete. However, it's also only as good as the information provided by the railroads. Here, I think the Kansas City Southern missed something. We'll get back to that.
© 2008 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
First, a color photo and caption from the Railway Prototype Cyclopedia (RPC) Volume 8 is the basis for the MTL model. Most of the "car copy" (the description provided by Micro-Trains for the model) is derived from this material. Right away there is an interesting potential juxtaposition found in the photo: the car clearly rides on Allied Full Cushion Trucks, which were banned about 1955 by the Interstate Commerce Commission, yet the car is coupled to a tri-level open autorack and what is probably a Chicago and North Western boxcar in the 1960's paint scheme, neither of which were around before 1955. It is possible that the photo, which is not dated or located, was taken on the home rails of the KCS, which would make the use of Allied Full Cushion trucks at least theoretically permissible.
© 2008 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
But wait another moment here: what is this car doing in the middle of a freight train anyway? The RPC states that four cars including the 400 were pulled from the 25100 to 25288 series of boxcars, equipped with steam and signal lines and Allied trucks, and placed in express service. Furthermore, Steve Sandifer notes on his "Foreign Cars in Santa Fe Passenger Trains" that these cars served on the Santa Fe's "Kansas City Chief" between Chicago and Kansas City. "KCS had express boxcars in extremely dark green (looks black) with red and yellow sill stripes like the passenger cars," writes Sandifer, "but that was in the 1960s." Sandifer posted a different photo of the 400, again undated and not located, but again in a freight train, this time between what looks like an Airslide covered hopper and a piggyback flat car carrying a silver trailer with REAZ reporting marks. Again, neither of those items existed in 1955, but this time the 400 has what looks like Bettendorf trucks. What looks like a slightly less cropped version of this same photo appears on George Elwood's "Fallen Flags" site credited to Nick Muff, in whose collection the previous two photos of the 400 are. I should mention at this point that the MTL 031 body style is not an exact match to the prototype. The door opening is nine feet, but this time, it almost looks like someone took an eight foot Youngstown door and welded some incremental material to it for an extra twelve inches in width.
© 2008 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
If we assume that the car served through the 1960's in passenger service, I would not expect that it would be in the ORERs, but in the Official Register of Passenger Equipment. Some railroads listed their express boxcars in the ORER anyway, but obviously the KCS did not, as no boxcar series numbered 400 to 403 appears in any Equipment Register I have from 1945 to 1970. The 1959 and 1964 ORERs go one better and call out numbers in the 300s to the 600s as cabooses. (In the January 1964 ORER, this gets better: there are KCS flat cars from 500 to 599, KCS cabeese from 300 to 671, and also cabooses numbered 301 to 389 and lettered for KCS subsidiary Louisiana and Arkansas.) I'm glad I wasn't a KCS car accountant in a past life, that's for sure. The ORER exists, among other purposes, to allow employees of various railroads to research rolling stock for appropriateness. What would they do if the KCS 400 showed up one day? I'm going to make a guess here-- they never got that opportunity because it was in captive freight service on the Kansas City Southern after completing its tour of duty in passenger service including the Kansas City Chief. Sandifer notes that the KCS purchased four baggage cars from the Santa Fe in 1964, so maybe that's when the boxcars were flipped to freight service.
© 2008 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
055 00 370, $21.20
I keep forgetting that the Monon was not only a bridge route between the Southeast and Chicago, and a proud carrier of general freight into and out of Indiana, but also a respectably-sized coal hauler. There's a short web page by Thomas Kepshire called "Mines Along the Monon" which provides a quick view of some of what the line did to haul black diamonds out of the coal fields of the Hoosier State. The Monon along with the Milwaukee Road served the Peabody Coal Company's operations in Indiana. And as late as 1955, the S&A Coal Corporation built a new tipple on the Monon at Victoria, which was at the end of one of the line's few branches. One of the two photos on the "Mines Along the Monon" page taken then shows a Monon hopper with composite sides waiting to be loaded. The Victoria Branch was originally the Indianapolis and Louisville Railroad, leased by the Monon starting in 1906 and officially called the 6th Subdivision of the line. Kepshire has two other web pages with more information on "The I&L Branch."
© 2008 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
My big surprise on this car was the paint scheme. My first thought was, what does Mont Switzer say about this? Mont is a nationally known modeler and scholar on the Monon, and I was wondering how I might get in touch with him. As it turned out, I didn't need to, as the first citation located in a search on the terms "Monon yellow hopper" is a reference to his own decal set number 303: "Modern Freight/Piggyback Lettering/Yellow - This set contains sufficient lettering to do all of the black box cars, hoppers and gondolas lettered with yellow lettering in the late 1950's." Hey, that was easy! I'm going to further assume that the August 1957 service date was when the yellow on black paint scheme was applied. I'm somewhat fuzzier-- OK, I'm a lot more fuzzy-- on the specific match between model and prototype. We do know that Micro-Trains' previous Monon hopper, released in road numbers 4090 and 4002 (catalog 55200/055 00 200, October 1984 and October 2004 respectively) represent the 1935 AAR "Standard" 50 ton hopper built for the line in 1954, series 4001 to 4150. Since MTL states that the car modeled this time was built in 1940, it might not be the same prototype.
© 2008 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
But it might not be bad either. The January 1959 ORER shows the series 41500 to 41699, which has room for 1500 hoppers but only contained 193 cars at the time. The inside length was 33 feet, inside width 10 feet 4 inches, outside length 34 feet, extreme height 10 feet 8 inches, and capacity 2171 cubic feet or 100,000 pounds. That's pretty close to the 4000 series, just 26 cubic feet larger in capacity for instance. The January 1964 ORER shows a slight dip to 189 cars in the group; I guess that goal of 1500 hoppers wasn't met. The April 1970 Equipment Register shows another small decrement to 187 cars. In June 1974 under the Louisville and Nashville listing (the Monon was merged in 1971) there were still 142 cars extant of which ten had been bumped to 110,000 pounds capacity. Less than two years later in April 1976 that was down to 70 cars with 18 of them at 55 tons. In the April 1981 ORER just one car remained, although the entire 41500 to 41699 series was listed.
© 2008 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
083 00 051 and 084 00 052, $19.45 each
This is one of at least two paint schemes in which these gondolas can be modeled, and knowing the GN I would not be surprised to learn that there are other choices as well. The Morning Sun Color Guide to the Great Northern shows sister car 75733 in the paint scheme depicted by MTL. Note that the "mineral red" used on this car is lighter than on other GN cars released in the past. It's sort of a cross between the darker freight car red on, say, the GN wood boxcars, and the bright "vermillion" red that came a bit later to the Great Northern. Based on the photos I would say this color shade choice is accurate. I'd also say that an unusual quibble surfaces, not noticeable on most model freight cars, and that's the placement of the equipment on the underframe.
© 2008 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
Micro-Trains notes the use of sans serif lettering on new freight cars through 1956 and rebuilt cars through 1970 when the GN was merged into the Burlington Northern. That may have been the rule, but the MSCG shows the larger slant serif roadname on the 75133 from the adjacent series of drop bottom gondolas, which was neither new nor a rebuild between 1956 and 1970. But that fact does provide another potential release option for the folks from Talent.
© 2008 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
There's no question from the MSCG photos that wood was carried in these cars. There's a shot of six or seven in a line being stacked high with logs at Camden, Washington in 1966. While the car lettering is not completely legible, the use of the small sans serif lettering paint scheme confirms the Approximate Time Period through at least that year. The pulpwood load supplied with the MTL cars looks quite good-- in fact, I think it's the best looking load supplied so far with any gondola, drop bottom or otherwise. Yes, this "scrap wood" as MTL calls it really did get piled that much above the top of the sides of the gondola. Some GN gondolas had small side extensions added to enable the piling on of even more.
© 2008 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
MTL gives a build date of 1937 and service date of 1948 for these cars. We'll begin with the later date for ORER lookups and go to the July 1950 issue. There we find the series 75500 to 75999 of all 500 possible cars, with inside length 40 feet 6 inches, inside width 9 feet 6 inches, inside height 5 feet 1 inch, outside length 41 feet 10 inches, extreme height 9 feet 7 inches, and capacity 2053 cubic feet or 100,000 pounds. The GN had a lot of drop bottom gondolas! Those numbered in the 70000's total more than two thousand cars, most of which are steel. We'll skip to the January 1959 ORER where 496 cars are shown in the series, then the January 1964 book where there are 486 cars of which seven had the small side extensions, and then to the April 1970 Burlington Northern listing where there are 167 total cars in the Great Northern series. I'm calling the end of the ATP as an "at least" there given potential repainting but it could go on; for example the April 1976 listing shows 90 total cars, four of which have been converted to solid bottom gondolas.
© 2008 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
101 00 110, $23.65
By the time we've exited the month of September, 2008, Casco Inc. will have celebrated its 150th Anniversary as a business concern. "Good Things Come From Corn" is its slogan and per its website, "Since 1858 Casco has been recognized as a pioneer in the corn wet milling industry in Canada, and has the distinction of being a premier supplier of sweeteners, starches, polyols and other specialty ingredients." It wasn't always "Casco" however.
© 2008 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
The firm started as Benson and Aspden and was the first wet milling company in Canada. Its first product was corn starch, also called "prepared corn" then. A box label image on the Casco website from that period declares Benson's Canada Prepared Corn to be "a table delicacy for all seasons". Beware of imitations! The company won a prize medal for its product at the London International Exhibition in 1862-- we assume this is London, England, not London, Ontario! From 1865 to 1905 the company operated as the Edwardsburg Starch Company and in 1906 became the Canada Starch Company Limited. Six years later the trademark "Casco" was registered.
© 2008 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
Although the company made starch, and later glucose, in Canada, much of the corn needed for this manufacturing came from the United States, and was therefore subject to not only incoming tariffs and duties, but also competition from US companies who could make the same products for less money. (Does this sound familiar?) Supplies of corn were often erratic and dried up altogether during the First and Second World Wars, improving only in the last few decades when Canadian farmers were encouraged to grow corn.
© 2008 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
In 1954, all outstanding shares of the Canada Starch Company were purchased by the Corn Products Refining Company, which had held a majority interest since 1919. Corn Products Refining was known for its Argo brand corn starch. (I had no idea how popular corn starch was before researching this car...) In 1958, Corn Products Refining Company merged with Best Foods to form Corn Products Company, which then became CPC International. CPC spun off the company Corn Products International in 1997, and Casco, the result of a merger of Canada Starch and another Ontario corn refiner, stayed inside that corporate structure.
© 2008 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
The company's fairly detailed history timeline at its official website includes a couple of railroad related items. In August 1947 it purchased its first diesel-electric locomotive, #6, which looks like a 44-ton switcher in the accompanying photo. In 1954 the first rail car of glucose was shipped to Western Canada. There's a tank car pictured, CSTX 28 in silver and black, with many proud executives standing around and on it. (Note to MTL: not quite a match to the 065 body style!)
© 2008 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
Meanwhile, the exact CGTX 17116 was photographed in August 2006 at Brantford, Ontario and is posted on the website RRPictureArchives.net. The lettering looks dead on including the load limit and light weight in both pounds and kilograms. The car itself is close to the MTL model. Differences I noticed was a sharper edge to the transition to the tank ends and the expansion hardware at the top center of the tank (where the "dome" would be). This car got around! It was in Shreveport, Louisiana on September 2, 2006, and the resulting photo is on RailcarPhotos.com. And a second photo of the 17116 on RRPictureArchives was lensed in Carbondale, Illinois as the first car of a Canadian National train, on September 28, 2006.
© 2008 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
Although MTL gives the build date for this car as May 1984, confirmed via views of the actual car, the lettering gives us a more recent start to the Approximate Time Period. The use of the Tank Qualification Stencil-- that's the rather large table on the far right side of the car-- was required as of no later than July 2000 in both the United States and Canada. So with the caveat that we don't know exactly when the Casco lease of these cars began, I'll call the ATP as "this decade." An article by Stuart Streit in the September 2000 issue of Railroad Model Craftsman details tank qualification standards and also provides some background on the history of testing tank cars.
© 2008 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
034 00 200, $18.75
The New York Central made quite a splash with its Century Green and black paint scheme, a far cry from the standard freight car red that they had been using for decades on its boxcars. The NYC's entry for what I call the Era of Color was introduced in 1958. Late in the next year, Despatch Shops in East Rochester, New York (right down the road from UMTRR HQ) constructed NYC Lot 895-B, of one hundred fifty foot double door boxcars numbered 47000 to 47099.
© 2008 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
The ORER for January 1964 shows the series described as "Box, Steel, 19-Rail 'DF' Loaders" with AAR Classification XML and these dimensions: inside length 50 feet 6 inches, inside width 9 feet 6 inches, inside height 10 feet 6 inches, outside length 51 feet 10 inches, extreme height 15 feet 1 inches, door opening 15 feet (slightly less than MTL's 16 foot door total), and capacity 4888 cubic feet or 100,000 pounds. The April 1970 listing for successor Penn Central shows 98 total cars of the original 100; 88 in the main series and ten more in four subgroups with different capacities. Fifty-five cars went into Conrail with NYC reporting marks as per the April 1976 Equipment Register. The cars were new enough that I think some would have been repainted into Penn Central equipment before the PC was conveyed to Conrail. But I don't dare try to figure out the PC's renumbering system.
© 2008 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
MTL mentions in its car copy that 26 of the original 100 cars were in service in 1981 and I can raise that to 28 as of the ORER for April of that year. This doesn't include cars in PC or CR paint of course. The NYC listing was down to just six cars in April 1984, one of which had lost its DF loaders. All six cars might have lost their roofwalks by then also... or not.
© 2008 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
The 47023 was one of the cars that survived into the 1980's, as it was photographed in November 1981 then at Middlefield, Massachusetts. That photo is available on RRPictureArchives.net. While I'm not completely sure of this given the angle of the photo, it appears that the roofwalk is still in place. The full height side ladder certainly is! The car is looking fairly worn out at this point, with many scratches from door openings and closings rusting and the reporting marks virtually invisible. The "DF" is long gone from the door; in fact the right hand door is a different shade of green than the rest of the car. The road number has been restenciled in what I think is the arch rival Pennsylvania Railroad's font, adding insult to injury.
© 2008 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
047 00 320, $20.55
I may own the Morning Sun Color Guide to the Erie and DL&W, but I knew I wasn't going to find a prototype photo of this car in that volume. What I did find, though, was some interesting information from authors Larry DeYoung and Mike Del Vecchio: "Erie for many years had its own refrigerator cars, primarily in westbound banana service from the Port of New York... Later, the Erie leased both wood and steel refrigerator cars from Union Refrigerator Transit, bearing URTX marks and an Erie monogram. The steel cars lasted into the 1950's..."
© 2008 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
OK, we can stop there and conclude that if the steel cars lasted into the 1950's, the wood ones didn't. There is a partial view of one of the steel reefers from May 1951 in a display marking the centennial of the completion of the original Erie mainline from Piermont to Dunkirk (the former on the Hudson River and the latter on Lake Erie). I note that the Erie monogram on that car is in black only on an orange car, so assuming that the MTL wood reefer is correctly painted, the scheme changed when going from wood to steel sides. That's not a particular surprise as many wood sheathed refrigerator cars had yellow sides and most steel cars had orange sides. George Elwood has an auxiliary site on the Erie Lackawanna aside from Fallen Flags, and there are three example photos of wood refrigerator cars done in Erie paint that preceded the URTC leased cars.
© 2008 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
Trying to trace freight car leasing is usually an exercise in futility. It's even more of one this time, as the road number 39840 and the previously run 39847 do not even show up in the Union Refrigerator Transit listings for July 1995, January 1940 or January 1945. Finally a series from 37500 to 39999 appears in the July 1950 ORER, but with no cars shown and no indication as to whether they are wood or steel. So now what? It's difficult to prove the absence of something, as I've noted many times before. (And let's not forget the KCS boxcar from this month, which clearly existed, but didn't as far as the ORERs were concerned.)
© 2008 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
I can tell you that Accurail has HO Scale models of URTX/Erie wood sheathed refrigerator cars with road numbers 27054 and 27383, each with paint schemes similar to but not exactly the same as the MTL car, or each other for that matter. Accurail gives build dates of 1924 and 1924/1936 for these cars. However, Branchline Trains indicates the 1930's and 1940's era for URTX cars leased to different railroads but wearing same general paint scheme as the one done for the Erie-- with different heralds, of course. The Morning Sun Color Guide to Refrigerator Cars shows 1950's era URTX cars with just reporting marks and lessor herald, so if we can get over the road number question, I think the ATP indicated is, well, approximately correct.
© 2008 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
And some years ago, Champ released a set of HO Scale decals for a wood refrigerator car in Erie / URTX decoration apparently aligning with the MTL model, with specifications of a build date of January 1937 and road numbers including 39407-- which also doesn't appear in the ORERs I checked. "Some years ago" probably pre-dates the July 1987 release of the first run of this car, and I strongly believe that many Kadee Micro-Trains releases from the 1970's and 1980's were, let us say, "inspired" by decal manufacturers such as Champ, Walthers and Herald King. That could explain the reference point and car copy for this release. However, while some if not many decal sets from the period are dead on, some, well, weren't, and today tend to be judged in a rather harsh light.
© 2008 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
New Release:
I suppose I have to keep up with the times. I was looking for something else unrelated to railroading when I came across a clip on YouTube and wondered whether there would be anything posted on the Durango and Silverton Railroad. After all, it is a major tourist attraction; certainly someone would have posted something by now. Something? How about more than 200 different clips? Not all of them are of the real D&S-- some are of virtual railroading from computer simulation software. And how's that for keeping up with the times... I have not looked at more than a couple of these videos but I would imagine that the general caveat about YouTube postings applies, namely that some selections are better than others. I'll leave the rest of this exercise to the reader.
© 2008 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
Had I had the patience (and time!) to run through all 200 plus videos, I might have come across the caboose MTL modeled, but I reverted to my old ways to find a mere still image of the 0540 on a Geocities site. (Spam filters hate references to that domain so I won't post the link here, but a search on the phrase "Equipment of the Durango and Silverton" should find the page for you.) The 0540 model is a pretty good match to the real thing; the first delta I noticed was that the prototype has a letterboard on which the roadname is painted which is a detail missing from the MTL depiction. The window count and placement looks good as does the two window cupola. The addition of "window glass" adds to the aesthetics of the model; if you're in for a challenge you could try to paint in the window mullions in the shade of brown used for the rest of the car. However, UMTRR Gang Member Michal Basta notes that "this MTL body has peaked roof and peaked cupola, the only prototype cars with that roof were D&RGW cabeese 0584 to 0589 which rates this model "as a stand-in only".
© 2008 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
I'm kind of wimping out on the Approximate Time Period; since the photo I found of the 0540 is dated 2007, I think "the present" is accurate. The Silverton Branch of the Rio Grande was purchased in 1981 and the D&S was formed, but I doubt that this caboose was painted in this manner from the outset. I have a feeling that copies of this car will be purchased by Nn3ers and sent directly to the paint shop, not a difficult task considering the relatively small amount of lettering in place.
© 2008 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
505 00 231 and 505 00 232, $19.65 each
400 miles in 400 minutes. That was the speed that gave rise to the name trains of the Chicago and North Western. In 1946 per the Official Guide of the Railways for October of that year, the Twin Cities "400" departed Chicago at 2:45 PM, made Milwaukee 75 minutes later at 4PM, and reached Minneapolis, 406 miles away, at 9:45 PM. That's seven hours or 420 minutes; hmm, maybe a bit of rounding off there. But that was a lot faster time than "The Viking" which traveled from Chicago to the Twin Cities via Madison and made many more stops, taking 12 1/2 hours for the journey. That probably wasn't going to rate a boxcar slogan. Also of note was that the transcontinental trains, mostly operated in conjunction with the Union Pacific, got much more prominence in the Official Guide than the 400's which stayed on C&NW rails.
© 2008 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
Hey, wait a minute, you might be asking, why reference a 1946 OG when the build date on the cars is 1957? Well... let's quote Richard Hendrickson, writing in the October 1995 issue of Rail Model Journal: "Built by Mount Vernon in 1937, the Chicago and North Western's 51196 to 51998 series auto cars had straight side sills, Viking corrugated roofs and 4/5 Dreadnaught ends. 'Route of the "400" and the Streamliners' was short-lived, but 'Route of the "400" Streamliners" appeared on many C&NW cars a decade later, after the '400' trains got streamlined equipment." The accompanying photo of C&NW 51598 shows-- uh oh-- a double door boxcar. Specifically, it's an example of the AAR type car from the 1930's and 1940's which enabled the carriage of a goodly amount of automobiles using Evans double deck auto racks.
© 2008 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
The various ORERs in the UMTRR Accumulation, starting in 1940 and going through to 1964, also shows these cars as having double doors. In fact, I almost missed them entirely in the earlier Equipment Registers, as they are shown as Automobile Cars separate from the rest of the boxcars in a listing that is grouped by rolling stock type. We can grab the January 1943 ORER as an example. The description is "Auto, All Steel, Wood Lined, Staggered Doors, Even Numbers" for two groups numbered 51000 to 51598 and 51600 to 51998 with identical dimensions. The inside length was 50 feet 6 inches, inside width 9 feet, inside height 10 feet 5 inches, outside length 51 feet 9 inches, door opening 14 feet 6 inches, extreme height 15 feet 1 inch, and capacity 100,000 pounds or either 4466 or 4822 cubic feet depending on the position of the racking inside of the car. Because only even numbers were used for this car type by the C&NW at the time, there are only 500 possible cars, and 497 were in service then. Jumping all the way to January 1964, we find that the cars' description has changed to "Box, All Steel, Wood Lined, Staggered Doors, Even Numbers" and a total of 203 remained in service. In April 1970, there were just four cars left. The C&NW had changed to a simpler paint scheme in the mid-1960's as evidenced by a photo of similar car 56104 from June 1966 in the March 1996 issue of Rail Model Journal.
© 2008 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
The heritage of this car in Kadee/MTL terms is the N Scale C&NW six pack from June 1981, where it was the only fifty foot boxcar of the six. Both single and double door boxcars were available then in Kadee's body style roster. So unless I'm really missing something here I don't quite get why a single sliding door boxcar was chosen in 1981 when a double door was available, and then perpetuated through this release. The 1957 build date painted on the car doesn't align with the paint scheme, which would be in use in the late 1930's and some of the 1940's before the "and the" was dropped from the slogan "400 and the Streamliners."
© 2008 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
522 00 171 and 522 00 172, $21.10 each
George Elwood names the Erie Lackawanna as his favorite railroad on his Fallen Flags website, stating that he worked out of the same shop in Cleveland that his grandfather did. Elwood serviced engines there between college and his work in the Air Force, and his affection for the line shows through in the impressive amount of EL data he's compiled for the site.
© 2008 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
Among this data are two images of the EL 17068 in Boonton, New Jersey (where some of my relatives lived!) circa 1975. A detail image shows what looks to be a replacement drop end while a three-quarter view from the opposite end shows the gondola in the same black and white paint scheme selected by MTL, including the consolidated stencils. While the ATP dates to the early 1960's, specifically post-1963 when the hyphen was removed from the roadname (as MTL notes), you'll need to remove that stencil to be more appropriate for that front end of the ATP. There are differences between the model and the prototype: most notably, 15 panels per side on the real car and 14 on the model, and the use of an end mounted lever brake handle versus a side mounted brake wheel on the MTL depiction. The build date on the car looks like January 1948; it's definitely in the forties. This is an important data point, as we'll see next.
© 2008 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
Information from the ORER Accumulation, frankly, confused me. Let's start with January 1964: the EL series 17027 to 17339 has inside length 52 feet 6 inches, inside width 9 feet 6 inches, inside height 3 feet 6 inches, outside length 54 feet 4 inches, extreme height 7 feet 6 inches, and capacity 1761 cubic feet or 140,000 pounds. There were only 62 cars in the group at that time; I would imagine the rest were still painted for the predecessor Erie Railroad. Using the ORER entry, the Morning Sun Color Guide to the Erie/DL&W and the Fallen Flags site, I tried to determine which Erie series these cars belonged to when they were built in 1955, but I was only able to eliminate choices, not make a definitive selection. (Someone with the Morning Sun Color Guide to the EL might be able to help here.) So far, so good, right?
© 2008 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
Yes, but the April 1970 Register shows precisely one gondola, the 17079, where there was a whole series in the '64 book. Where did they go? Or perhaps the question should be, how did they come back? There is a series 17000 to 17299 listed once again in the July 1974 book, with 132 cars and no dimensional data. What? Usually this means a newly acquired series of cars, but recall that the photo on Fallen Flags has a build date of 1946.
© 2008 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
The April 1975 book shows a group of 92 cars with inside height of 3 feet 6 inches and outside length of 57 feet 7 inches, and another 36 including the MTL modeled road numbers with inside height of 3 feet 3 inches and outside length of 57 feet 2 inches. The inside length is the same 52 feet 6 inches as the series shown in 1964, and the capacity is also the same. So what do we have here? A mystery. For the record, the 17030 and 17059 were included in Conrail as of April 1976 along with 120 other cars in the group. That was down to just six cars in the April 1981 Register.
© 2008 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
The "mixed" ATP is given for this release, but the presence of the consolidated stencils really means that the "true" Approximate Time Period is the second one, the 1970's and 1980's. Should you remove those stencils and perhaps add back some older dimensional data, I don't see why you couldn't operate these cars on a 1960's dated Z Scale layout with a little bit of Modeler's License. Certainly the included scrap load isn't going to give you away.
© 2008 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
525 00 141 and 525 00 142, $17.90 each
OK, so at first glance, I thought I'd have no problem lifting the February 2001 UMTRR commentary for the N Scale release of a Rio Grande flat car from the same prototype series. But hold the phone there. These are forty foot flat cars, not fifty foot flat cars. Er, "length thing," anyone?
© 2008 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
Be that as it may, we noted back in 2001 that Rail Model Journal reported that the Rio Grande had a number of flats equipped for and dedicated to specific service. For example, some carried containers of molybdenum concentrate (and please don't ask me to pronounce "molybdenum"!) and others were fitted with bulkheads. This accounts for the "FMS" designation, the "S" referring to "where cars are equipped with permanent racks for stowing parts, or specially modified or equipped to provide for loading of a particular commodity."
© 2008 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
It's the January 1959 ORER where we pick up the series 23000 to 23099 described as "Flat, Steel Underframe" but with that "FMS" designation. The inside length of the prototype was 53 feet 6 inches and the outside length 54 feet 6 inches. Capacity was 100,000 pounds; cubic feet isn't terribly relevant when dealing with flat cars. All 100 cars are present in the January 1959 Register, there are 99 in January 1964, and 98 in April 1970. By April 1981 the "FMS" is back to an "FM" designation, and the length over the couplers has increased from the original 54 feet 6 inches to 56 feet 8 inches, indicating that extended draft gear or cushioning could have been added. The series is still at a healthy 87 cars. But in 1991, it's down to 46, and just two remain in the October 1996 ORER. I believe that the main paint scheme remained constant during this time, but add ACI Labels and consolidated stencils as appropriate for this part of the ATP. (Note that MTL shortens the distance between the reporting marks and the roadname in order to fit both on the shorter car.) The table of flat cars on the website of the Rio Grande Historical and Modeling Society indicates that the cars were built to an AAR design with 15 pockets per side by American Car and Foundry.
© 2008 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
981 01 131 and 981 01 132, $185.95 each
I never realized that the ICG and I share two important dates. First, predecessor and main component Illinois Central was "born" on the same date-- February 10-- that I was, although over a hundred years earlier. Second, the ICG merger took place on August 10, 1972; August 10 seventeen years later was my wedding date. And how's that for relatively useless trivia?
© 2008 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
Anyway, had repainting been timely, the Approximate Time Period would have been August 10, 1972 to February 29, 1988 since that was the time that the merged Illinois Central and Gulf, Mobile and Ohio were officially known as the Illinois Central Gulf. After that the "Gulf" was dropped and it was back to just Illinois Central. We wouldn't expect that these diesels appeared in orange and white paint on the day of the merger, nor would we expect an instant relettering when the name was changed. The "orange empire" as it was called on the IC & ICG Photo Archive lasted from 1966 when the then-IC adopted the paint scheme to 1989 when the again-IC replaced it with the "new image" gray decoration.
© 2008 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
The 2501 and 2505 were built in 1964 for the Gulf, Mobile and Ohio as its 602 and 606 and unlike the MTL model, rode on ALCo trucks, perhaps from traded-in FA's. Those trucks are obvious in a photo of the 2501 posted on the above website and also in photos of both units on Fallen Flags and RRPictureArchives.net. The photos date to the mid-1980s which lead to my conclusion that they stayed in the orange and white until they were dispositioned by the railroad.
© 2008 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
And here's where they went: In 1986 the 2501 was sold to VMV Locomotive, which after given up by the ICG, operated the Paducah Shops famous for their "Paducah Rebuilds" of numerous Illinois Central and other locomotives including GP8's, 11's and 12's. VMV continues as "VMVPaducahbilt" after several ownership changes and one bankruptcy.
© 2008 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
In 1987 the 2505 kept its number and was sold to the Paducah and Louisville, a spinoff of the IC dating to 1986 that operates between its namesake towns. The P&L and VMV were once owned by the same company, and VMVPaducahbilt rebuilt the P&Ls GP35s and GP40-3s into "mother-slug" sets.
© 2008 George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. Reposting prohibited.
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