The 1956 SP renumbering

 Most modelers interested in freight cars are aware that, starting in 1956, Southern Pacific renumbered almost all its freight cars into a new system, largely with six-digit numbers. The new system was first promulgated in late December, 1955, and it is possible that no cars received the new numbers until 1956, thus the usual name for this, the “1956 renumbering.’ Evidence from Official Railway Equipment Register (ORER) issues is that the process was virtually complete by the end of 1958.

This renumbering is one of several changes in SP freight car practice that make a “great divide” in car appearance in the mid-1950s. The other major one is the introduction of sans-serif road names in large letters, reflecting SP public-document style after World War II. Thus one can compare a box car like the Class B-50-23 example shown below (Pullman photo for SP)

with a post-1956 repaint and new car number like this one (SP photo), also Class B-50-23; the round circle-and-bar emblem was retained until 1957. Subsequently, the circle-and-bar was discontinued, and the large sans-serif road name moved to the right of the car door.

In my five-book series entitled Southern Pacific Freight Cars (Signature Press), I gave examples of all the car renumberings, class by class (more on that in a moment). 

But SP had already realized, by the fall of 1948, that five-digit car numbers simply were exhausted. That fall, orders of both new 40-foot box cars, and 53-foot gondolas, were delivered with six-digit numbers. Between 1948 and 1956, more and more car types began to receive six-digit numbers (for example, flat cars after 1949, hoppers and covered hoppers after 1951). But the apparent “system” underlying these car numbers was entirely replaced in 1956.

A single-page summary was released on December 23, 1955, by the Office of the Superintendent of Motive Power (which also oversaw rolling stock), and I show this below. (You can click on the image to enlarge it if you wish.) All this information, of course, is in my five-book series.

This was followed a few days later by a nine-page document giving the details for every class of freight car then in existence on the railroad. I show below just one example, page 3, for solid-bottom gondolas.

In addition, a similar document, seven pages long, was released in early 1962 when T&NO freight cars began to be incorporated into the SP and its system numbering. That information also, of course, was included in all the relevant parts of the five-book series.

All this is usually well-known for transition-era SP modelers. For the modeler who does not specifically model SP, this kind of information is important in creating accurate SP freight cars for whatever period is chosen, especially for the pre-1948, pre-1956 or post-1958 modeler. Car numbers in particular are distinctive markers of the era in those ranges of years, and realistic modeling calls for having the right kinds of car numbers for the period chosen.

Tony Thompson

A 3D-printed freight car, Part 2

 The potential for 3D-printing of entire freight car bodies has been recognized for some time. But the latest one I have seen is remarkable in the amount of detail parts that can be printed on the car body or underframe. I showed those parts as they come from the printer, produced by Eric Boone, in the previous post (see it at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2022/04/one-piece-3d-printed-freight-cars.html ). 

When the car body is freed from its supports and base, the underfloor is revealed, containing four hexagonal cavities which accept 2-56 nuts, that will in turn accept the truck screws and coupler box screws.

And with both pieces removed, the underlying “forest” of supports from the printing process are revealed. These are fairly brittle, so care is necessary in cutting the parts free. But I found that this goes very quickly, mostly using a sprue cutter on the outer supports, then a utility knife on the remainder.

Eric recommended that as soon as the underframe part is freed from its base, that it be glued to the car body, in case it should have a tendency to warp. I did that, using canopy glue. As soon as that was set, I looked toward the parts I would be adding, brake staff and wheel, and sill steps. For these, I wanted to compare to the prototype, 2000 cars built in 1930, numbered PM 90350–92349.

My first stop was to look up these cars in the superb book by Arthur B. Million and John C. Paton, Pere Marquette Revenue Freight Cars (Hundman Publishing, 2001), which I reviewed in an earlier post (you can see that review at: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2018/01/auto-industry-traffic-part-6.html ). 

Here I learned that the first 1500 cars of this 2000-car group were built by Pullman, with the last 500 coming from Pressed Steel Car Co. and having end doors. Of the Pullman cars, having side doors only, all but the first 300 cars were equipped with auto loading racks, AAR Class XAR. Obviously our model, not having end doors, models one of the Pullman-built cars. Below is a photo of one such Pullman car (C&O Historical Society).

Note on this car that the sill steps correspond to A-Line Style B. Eric Boone’s kit directions suggest Style C, which would indeed be correct for the Pressed Steel Car products but not for the Pullman cars. 

Starting in 1948, Chesapeake & Ohio (having taken over Pere Marquette) began to renumber the cars we are discussing, renumbering most into six-digit numbers groups within the 254000–256000 series. By 1953, when I model, the Official Railway Equipment Register shows that about 500 of the Pullman-built cars in the series we are modeling remained with PM reporting marks. Accordingly, I will so letter my model. For those wanting to letter for C&O, there is a photo of one of these cars in C&O lettering on page 146 in the Million & Paton book. 

One last prototype detail: by 1953 all but a handful of the surviving PM cars of this kind no longer had auto racks, were then Class XM, and were assigned to auto parts service. Therefore, they did not have the white door stripes indicating auto racks, and would have actually looked much like the builder photo above (except the word “furniture” had been dropped).

Last task before painting was to install a brake wheel and staff. I used 0.019-inch brass wire and a wheel from the parts stash (maker not known), and attached them with canopy glue. I will move on to painting and lettering in a future post.

Tony Thompson

SP car ledger donation, Part 2

 In the first post on this topic, I showed the appearance of the so-called “car ledgers” of the Southern Pacific (formally, Freight Car Records), with car fleet history from 1920 into the late 1950s. I described the contents in a broad manner, and listed the titles of the eleven volumes of surviving ledgers  — all have now been donated to CSRM (California State Railroad Museum). That post is here: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2021/10/sp-car-ledgers-donated-to-csrm.html . 

I should give a little background. As the merger of SP into Union Pacific approached in 1996, many items of historical or economic interest vanished from offices and shops around the system. These ranged from original oil paintings in the headquarters at 1 Market Street, San Francisco, to individual tools in many shop buildings, and of course historical materials of all kinds. 

The set of car ledgers that is the topic of this post was no exception, and a single employee managed to take them all home. I will not identify that individual, but will just say that when the location of the ledgers was determined, Steve Peery and I approached that individual to persuade either a sale or a donation to CSRM. 

No prizes for guessing which one. Steve and I split the considerable price (which will now become a tax deduction), after being told that the alternative was for individual volumes to be sold separately on eBay. Had that happened, likely several or most of them would never have been seen again. But let’s get back to the contents of these books.

In the previous post, I mentioned the headers of the pre-printed Form 4589 pages. One is shown below, which happens to be for Class A-50-6, the famous “door and a half” wood-sheathed automobile cars, once the subject of a popular Ambroid kit in HO scale, and more recently of an excellent Funaro & Camerlengo resin kit. You can click on the image to enlarge it if you wish.

Quite a few details of the construction are shown here, including such specialties as the Bettendorf truck sideframes, Camel door devices, and Simplex truck bolsters, along with many detailed dimensions. Below the header are the individual columns. Here the one of interest to modelers is the installation of geared hand brakes (column 7), meaning Ajax brake gear in most cases. Note also that some repetitive entries are made with rubber stamps.

For just one example of the extensive car records themselves, below is a single page of Class B-50-15 box car histories. These record when and where the car was steel-sheathed (if it was), where and when any changes of trucks were made, and when and where it was renumbered into a six-digit number (and that number is shown). Finally, dates and places of scrapping or sale outside of SP are also shown if that occurred during the life of this record volume.

Note furthermore that the records for these cars were so extensive that the facing page includes additional columns of information about the same cars whose numbers are shown on the left page. In other words. these are double-page entries for an entire class of cars.

Finally, let me show a closer-up view of what these records look like. Here I return to the Class A-50-6 records mentioned above, to show complete lines of some of the entries.

Among many interesting details, note the renumbering of some cars into 52000-series numbers, just to the right of previous car numbers. These denote conversion to wood-chip cars with roofs removed. 

For a more close-up example, here are some of the entries for Class B-50-15 box cars. As with the automobile cars shown above, the car numbers crossed out denote removal from revenue service.

I suppose it is obvious, but records of this degree of detail permitted me, in writing the five-book series, Southern Pacific Freight Cars, to have detailed historical knowledge, not only of how each car class was built, but how it was changed during its lifetime, up to and including scrapping date. These ledgers were a critical resource. 

It should be mentioned that three categories of cars, covered in two of these record books, are only briefly covered. They are maintenance of way cars, cabooses, and passenger cars. In each of those cases, SP maintained “car cards,” 5 x 7-inch index cards, one for each car, that are far more detailed than what is in these record books. Luckily, at least two of those sets of car cards survive. The authors of two SP car books, a caboose book and a maintenance of way book, used the car cards as the primary reference. Nevertheless, the Record volumes are complementary to those sets of car cards.

The ending date of use of these volumes is not known for sure. Although someone in the Mechanical Department did make a few entries later than 1957, in general, the use of these Record books was ceasing about that time, as SP records of many kinds were being transferred to computer data management and storage. Little if any of the information in later days has survived in the kind of form shown in these Record books. But at least these books are now at CSRM.

Tony Thompson

SP car ledgers donated to CSRM

 Many readers of this blog (or of my five-book series, Southern Pacific Freight Cars) will know that Southern Pacific kept large book-style ledgers with detailed information about the repair and upgrading history of its entire freight car fleet. The first set of these ledgers was apparently begun at the very start of the Associated Lines era, circa 1900 or 1901.

Those early ledgers have been preserved at CSRM (California State Railroad Museum) for many years. They are extremely useful to the historian because they include many quite old cars that were still in service in 1900, though in many cases, not for long.

That set of ledgers was superseded in 1920, very likely at the end of the period of Federal control during the United States Railroad Administration (USRA) in March of that year. The new ledgers picked up all the existing cars, entries probably transferred right from the old ledgers, and continued forward well into the 1950s, until they were superseded by computer records. The latter, of course, do not survive, as all the archival tapes, tape drives, computer systems, and even software are long gone.

The ledgers begun in 1920 have now been donated to CSRM, to join the pre-1920 set. These large books have often been called “ledgers” (as I do here), both by those who used them, and by historians, though they are properly called (I am told) Freight Car Records. All consist of pre-printed page sheets, 14 x 17 inches in size, set up to record the origins of each car and its subsequent alteration or major repair, one line for each car.
 
What survived at the end of the SP are eleven volumes of these records. I will show a list of the titles of them shortly. You can see in the photo below that the pile of all 11 of them is about two and a half feet high; that’s a 12-inch ruler.

You can also see that they vary in external condition, though inside they are all pretty clean. The next photo below shows a single book, probably an above-average appearance, alongside the same 12-inch ruler. All are like this in that they have heavy cardboard covers, and most have printed canvas spines. Most of the books are on screw posts; a few have been counter-nailed closed. 

This particular book has the title on the spine, as do most books. In case it is difficult to read, the title describes hog fuel (wood chips), hopper, logging, and tank cars.

This set of eleven  books falls into two groups. The first group are the ones begun in 1920, and includes all cars existing at that time. Entries in these books continue into the late 1950s, as I will explain later.
 
The second group came into being after World War II, when SP first began to apply six-digit car numbers, at first to a few car groups, and a little later, to all existing cars (except stock and tank cars). The second group of books was created to contain records of existing cars under their new car numbers, as well as all new cars with six-digit numbers.

Here are the titles of the first group:
   Single Door Box Cars, classes CS-33 through B-50-14
   Single Door Box Cars, B-50-15 through B-50-27
   Stock & Auto
   Flat - - Gondola
   Hog Fuel - - Hopper - - Logging - - Tank
   Pass Cars
   M of W  - - Cabs
 
Here are the second-group titles:
   New Single Door Box Cars
   New Double Door Box Cars
   Spec Book (Specially equipped cars, box, gondola, flat etc.)
   New Gondola - - Hopper - - Flat

As a note, the “Spec Book” in the list above refers to cars having specialized equipment, and all the number groups of cars so equipped (types as listed) are shown above.
   
Next, I want to show the typical interior of these books.Below is a sample interior of the single book shown above. This spread happens to be part of the entries for logging cars, in this case the skeleton log cars of the 99000 series. These are the standard 14 x 17-inch pages.

These pages, like all pages in these books, are pre-printed forms (Form 4589) that were used for all car types. Each page has a heading, containing blanks for many aspects of car construction and original equipment. Below the heading are lines for individual car entries, and the column headings are originally blank, chosen later to record such things as truck changes, brake gear revisions, and upgrades or modifications. All such entries give the exact day the work was completed, and the shop where it was done. Visibly, these are nearly all handwritten.

I want to show more of the ways the book interiors look, and will return to that in a subsequent post. But the important message of this post is that these books are now preserved at CSRM.

Tony Thompson

Freight car handling and distribution: a response

 In recent posts about car fleet proportions, I described my understanding of the ways in which freight cars usually moved about the country, and gave some specific examples. Part of this description was a summary of the Gilbert-Nelson idea (of which, more below). You can find the newest post here: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2021/05/the-unusual-cars-on-your-freight-roster.html .

A very interesting comment on that post was provided by Dan Smith and is appended to that post. Because I wanted to comment in more detail than seemed appropriate in the “comments” segment, I am doing so here. To begin, here is Dan’s comment (I have taken the liberty of dividing it into paragraphs):

“On thinking about the proportion of foreign and small road cars, it occurs to me that the assumption that foreign road cars were free-running, especially in the 1950s, is probably misleading. In my experience railroads typically divided other railroads into three categories: connections (e.g. UP, to SP), competitors (e.g. ATSF, to SP), and Neutrals (e.g. PRR or NYC to SP). 

“Railroads would generally see many inbound cars from connections, and would be somewhat likely to spot those cars for return loading. Railroads would see few inbound cars from competitors, and would return them empty rather than willingly spotting them for return loading. You might see ATSF reefers in peak ag season when SP was short, but SP would actively avoid providing ATSF cars to on-line customers. (It is true that some customers would specifically make troublesome requests as bargaining leverage.) Pooled cars would be an exception, but it would also be rare for a railroad to enter into pooling with a competitor. 

“Neutrals would show up depending on where on-line customers bought their goods, and would be returned empty. If Jupiter Pumps had a supplier on the DSSA in Duluth, you might see DSSA boxcars regularly. These practices changed in later years as multi-carrier pooling for major customers, such as GM and Ford, became more common. But free-running cars have always been the exception. That exception was why the incentive per-diem boxcar program led to colorful short-line boxcars all over the country in the 1980s.That's also why TTX stenciled "Next load any road" on Railbox cars - it was the exception.
“So bring that DSSA boxcar onto the layout once a month with a load of castings for Jupiter, but be sure to send it back empty!”

Let  me begin by saying that Dan omits one very, very important aspect of freight car supply and handling: the state of the economy. When the economy is slack, and empty car supply accordingly plentiful, every road has surplus empties and, as Dan says, is happy to send them homeward. But when the economy is booming, cars soon are in short supply, and now the opposite case occurs: roads are scrambling for enough empties to serve their shippers, and will use anything available, even in violation of the Car Service Rules, to get that done.

Beyond that, Dan is quite right that railroads were fully aware of their close competitors (like Santa Fe versus SP, as Dan mentions), and would strive never to spot one of the competitor’s cars for loading. The same relationship applied between PFE and Santa Fe’s SFRD. 

There were also connecting roads that might be “friendly” connections, such as Northern Pacific in Portland, for the SP. These might well get a little better treatment in interchange. Dan seems to think that most arriving loads would be in cars owned by these connections, and I have no idea what that is based on. I have never seen any data that point in that direction, and perhaps Dan can direct me to examples. 

My only thought is that Dan is thinking of later years when Special Car Order 90 (SCO 90) began to dominate movement of empty cars, and more and more railroads added themselves to SCO 90 to obtain empties directly homeward. But that’s a later era than I was describing.

But now let’s look at what Dan calls “neutrals,” essentially all other railroads in the country. Dan thinks that the cars of neutrals were not free runners. I know of no basis for this in the 1950s, which was the period I emphasized. In fact, several authorities, including Eugene W. Coughlin (a manager in AAR’s Car Service Division), in his book, Freight Car Distribution and Car Handling in the United States (AAR, 1956), specifically identify the entire national fleet as free-running. This of course does not apply to specially-equipped or assigned-service cars, but certainly to most box cars, gondolas and flat cars. 

Moreover, Dan states that the DSS&A would use its own box car to ship to California, and, he adds, would get it back empty. This violates the Car Service Rules in both directions, and is exactly the reason those rules were set up. Not every car movement was in accord with those Rules, to be sure, but in the early 1950s, over two-thirds of all car movements were in accord. 

In fact, a quite likely car in which that shipper on the DSS&A would load for California would be an SP box car, which is what the Car Service Rules would direct.

Lastly, let’s again remember Gilbert-Nelson. This interesting idea states that at least on main lines of most railroads, the “free-running” freight cars, particularly box cars and gondolas, would move around the country somewhat randomly, as needed by shippers. That in turn suggests that the frequency of observation of any particular railroad’s freight cars, anywhere in the nation, would be in proportion to the size of that railroad’s total freight car fleet, relative to the national fleet.

A number of pieces of actual train consist data from the 1950s supported Gilbert-Nelson, so many of us interested in car distribution accept it as at least broadly true for that era. But if we accept Dan’s description of car handling, it could not be true. “Neutral” empties would always be getting sent home, instead of being loaded, and the further away a particular neutral might be located, the less frequently its cars would show up.

Dan is perhaps thinking primarily about railroading after the 1950s, when, as he says, more and more specially-equipped cars were put in service, and the “general purpose” box car or gondola became a smaller and smaller proportion of the national fleet. Certainly he is right that the IPD box cars, and the Railbox fleet, were aimed at countering those trends; but now we are talking about an era twenty or more years later than what I was discussing.

I will repeat what I said in response to Dan’s comment on my previous post: it is an interesting and though-provoking set of remarks, and I have enjoyed thinking through the topics that Dan raised. Moreover, as stated above, I agree with some of it. But there are other parts that I think are simply wrong, in the 1950s era that I discussed, and I’ve explained why, above. But I still have to thank Dan, for the stimulus and for taking the time to think and comment.

Tony Thompson

Car fleet proportions, Part 2

 This post is a follow-on to the recent post about proportions of a freight car fleet, a much more general topic (you can review that post at this link: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2021/05/proportions-of-freight-car-fleet.html ). In the present post, I want to turn to the issue, not of fleet size, but of what cars are in each fleet. The previous post’s graphs were for entire car fleets (minus coal, ore and ballast cars). Now let’s delver further into details. 

I would begin with the national car fleet, as described in ICC statistics for Dec. 30, 1950. The table shown below was published in the 1953 Car Builders’ Cyclopedia, page 69.

What I suppose we could call the “bottom line” is at lower right, the total U.S. freight car fleet size of a little over 2 million cars. These statistics unfortunately combine gondola and hopper cars, both important categories. I only have data for Class I railroads (one of the columns above), but for 1950, there were 556,000 hoppers, 23,000 covered hoppers, and 285,000 gondolas. We can use this ratio, 556 / 865, to estimate that in the above table, the 882,000 combined hoppers and gondolas comprised 572,000 hoppers.

But other categories are clearly called out in the table, and we can recognize that the largest category is box cars (including auto cars), at about 720,000, followed by hoppers and gondolas. With that bottom-line number, we can make a bar graph of the national car fleet at the end of 1950.

Keep in mind, looking at this graph, that no railroad or any car owner could match this graph exactly. As the table above shows, nearly all tank cars and refrigerator cars were in private ownership. Moreover, each railroad owned a fleet of freight cars suited to its territory and its traffic. The graph of the car fleet for one’s layout might look like this, but no individual car owner could do so.

This is an interesting piece of information, the composition of the national fleet, but how do we do the same for individual railroads? We turn to the Official Railway Equipment Register, or ORER, in this case for April 1950 (the issue I have). We can quickly assemble bar graphs like the one shown above, but for individual railroads. 

I will begin with the Pennsylvania. We saw in the previous post that their car fleet was the largest in the U.S., with or without hopper cars. Here is a graph of the constituents of the PRR fleet.  I’ve retained the order of car types from the graph above.

Let us look for a second at just the Pennsylvania box cars. In 1950, they were more than 8 percent of the entire national fleet of box cars, so on many layouts, you might expect 8 percent of the foreign road box cars to be PRR cars. (Note that I separate foreign cars from home-road cars; the issue of home-road car percentages is an interesting but separate one, as I’ve described: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2012/12/choosing-model-car-fleet-some-numbers.html .) 

 What that 8 percent would mean can be shown with a numerical example. Let’s imagine that you have, or plan to have, a freight car fleet for your layout that will include 150 box cars that can be foreign-road cars (this is a big number, but just an example). The data above then suggest that 12 of your 150 foreign-road box cars will be PRR cars.

What about a sizeable road, though the smallest one in the bar graph of railroad fleets in the previous post, the Rock Island (formally, Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific)? Let’s look at that. First, here’s a graph like the one above, dramatizing how the Rock Island fleet was dominated by box cars. (Many other Western railroad fleets were also dominated by box cars.) Unless you model a road adjoining the Rock Island, you are only likely to see box cars as Rock Island foreign cars. Note also how different was the composition of the Rock Island fleet, compared to the PRR graph shown above.

In 1950, the presumably free-running Rock Island box cars, AAR type XM, numbered a bit over 17,000 cars. The national fleet of such cars was about 720,000 cars, making the Rock Island fleet about 2.3 percent of all box cars. In model terms, that might mean that if my model railroad has 150 foreign-road box cars, about 3 should carry RI reporting marks. 

Now I will show just one more example, the Southern Railway, which is interesting because of the substantial number of flat cars, well above the national average. Moreover, the ORER shows us that fully two-thirds of these were AAR type LP flat cars, meaning equipped for pulpwood service. This was a regional emphasis (the Seaboard fleet was similar in this regard), but the difference emphasizes the need to understand each railroad separately. And one might well decide that those pulpwood flats would not travel far beyond the rails of the Southern or its neighbors.

I will continue with some more observations on individual railroad car fleets in a future post.

Tony Thompson

Waybills, Part 79: weight stamps

 In a number of previous posts about waybills, I have touched on the issue of car weights, most recently in a post about various ways these weights were shown on prototype waybills. I included some comment about how model waybills could show the same. To consult that post, you can use this link: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2021/01/waybills-part-78-car-weights.html .

In the present post, I want to show some additional prototype weight agreement stamps, all from the waybill collection of Andy Laurent, whose help I greatly appreciate. I will begin with the question of the various regional bureaus that administered weight agreements (both calibrating scales and negotiating unit-weight agreements). 

I’ve shown in previous blogs, examples of the stamps of the Western Weighing & Inspection Bureau (or WWIB), which covered the Midwest, not the Far West. An example is shown below for a WWIB stamp, with its agreement number in the center. This was usually stamped, as here, in the area of the waybill where weights were recorded. One thing I like in this example is that it is a little unevenly stamped, left to right, a realistic detail that will look good on model waybills.

There were also Eastern, Central and Southern WIBs, and the Far West was administered by the Trans-Continental Freight Bureau. I will have more to say on the TFB in a future post, but that makes a total of five bureaus. There may even be others; if any reader knows of others, please let me know.

Let me extend my examples. First, here is an EWIB stamp. Note that it was stamped with purple ink, though the great majority of these stamps were black.

I don’t know the boundaries of the various WIBs, only their approximate territory, though there is reason to believe that they were creatures of the regional Tariff Bureaus, which had the same kind of regional names. If the boundaries were the same, it would simplify matters.

I mentioned a Central WIB above. Andy has not found many Central stamps on his waybills, but here is one example. Note that the name is reversed: Central Inspection and Weighing Bureau (CI&WB).

The Canadians had their own system, apparently divided into Eastern Lines and Western Lines (if a Canadian reader can correct that statement, please do so.) Here is a Canadian Freight Association stamp:

I mentioned above that most stamps were black, and that is borne out by looking at many, many waybills, Purple does show up occasionally, and so does red. Here is a red example.

These stamp images can be converted to “transparent” images that can be overlaid onto waybill forms, as I have shown in previous blogs, and in a future post I will talk about that topic a little more. But this post shows the regional differences I am aware of.

Tony Thompson

Pennsy freight cars, Part 4: more gondolas

The previous post in this series introduced the topic of Pennsylvania Railroad gondolas in the transition era, both as a fraction of the total PRR car fleet, and in the form of comparison of quantities of cars in the major PRR classes in 1939 and 1955.  That post can be found at the following link: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2020/11/pennsy-freight-cars-part-3-gondolas.html .

That post, however, only addressed the G22 class in any specific detail. In the present post, I want to consider the other important classes in the early 1950s. The graph of car classes in the previous post (see link above) showed the importance of class G22 in the 1950s, along with classes G27 and G31. I will address those classes below, but first I want to introduce class G26.

Class G26, built in 1930, was the first class of 65-foot mill gondolas on the PRR. All had drop ends and steel floors. Though the 1700 cars built are a small class by PRR standards, no other railroad had this quantity of 65-foot cars. A photo from the 1940 Car Builders’ Cyclopedia is shown below. It clearly depicts the four heavier side stakes, two at the bolsters and two at the major crossbearers, the points where the slanting part of the fishbelly sides joins the horizontal side in the car center.

Years ago, E&B Valley created an HO scale kit for this car, which was then sold for some years by Eastern Car Works (often available on eBay). It is a pretty decent model of the car, except that it sits extremely high on the trucks. This can be corrected, as I have done with my own model, following the kit review by Andy Sperandeo (Model Railroader, August 1981, page 44). It’s shown in my layout town of Shumala, with the Southern Pacific Coast Division main line in the foreground. The load is kitbashed from a pair of Atlas bridge girders.

But this is not one of the two large classes after 1950. Let me turn to G27. This class was built during 1936–1939, 4500 cars all told (by the year I model, 1953, fully 4495 cars were still in service!). As with class G26, this was more than any other railroad’s group of 52 ft. 6 in. gondolas. And similarly to G26, the side posts were heavier at the bolsters and major crossbeareers. The most distinctive aspect of this design, never duplicated by PRR or anyone else, was that the sides tapered inwards below the floor level. The photo below is a PRR image, from the Jack Consoli collection, courtesy Martin Lofton; you can see the inward taper below the floor.

For modeling, there was an excellent Sunshine kit, no. 48.6. My model from this kit is shown below, being tilted so you can see the side taper. The model has Kadee 2D-F8 trucks, and remains to be weathered, after which the reweigh and repack data would be added. Once the model is well weathered and has a coat of flat finish, the taper is much harder to see, thus this view.

Finally, I want to consider the large G31 class (and sub-classes). Here there were 12,150 cars built during 1949–1951, all of them 52 ft., 6 in. long inside. Most cars had welded sides, wood floors, and drop ends. But there were variations. Sub-classes G31C and G31E had riveted sides (apparently because not enough welded manufacturing capability was available), and sub-classes G31D and G31E had fixed ends. Below is a photo of G31B, from American Car & Foundry (courtesy Ed Kaminski). Note that now all side posts are almost the same.

It is worth observing that there were only 750 cars of G31C, 1200 of G31D and 500 of G31E, totaling 2450 out of the class total of 12,150 cars, or 20 percent. So the “exceptions” are not the best modeling choices.

For modeling there has long been a Con-Cor (formerly Revell) model which is riveted and thus could model the two riveted sub-classes, but has many inaccuracies (which are correctable; see the Bill Darnaby article, Model Railroader, December 1993, page 96). I did go through that non-trivial set of corrections myself to make one of these cars, but today, we have a superb Tangent model, which reproduces G31B. My Tangent car, with added weathering, is shown below.

The Pennsylvania owned a lot of  gondola cars because so much steel of all kinds was produced and shipped in PRR territory. This fleet was extremely visible throughout North American, and deserves representation in every transition-era modeler’s fleet.
Tony Thompson

Pennsy freight cars, Part 3: gondolas

 I began this series of posts with some general observations about the freight car fleet of the Pennsylvania Railroad, compared to other major railroad car fleets, in 1950. My comparison emphasized the size of all the fleets with hopper cars omitted — because for much of the country, hoppers aren’t very visible in interchange, a point I’ve made elsewhere. (My first PRR post of the present series can be found here: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2020/11/modeling-pennsy-freight-cars.html ).

I mentioned in that first post that a distinguishing feature of the PRR was that it had about equal numbers of box cars, gondolas and  hoppers. The pair of car fleet graphs below show this. The graph on the left is the national car fleet in 1950, and to the right is the PRR fleet in that year. The vertical bars are in the same order by car type in both graphs, but for the present comparison you only need to know that the first three bars are for box cars, hoppers, and gondolas. (You can click on the image to enlarge it if you wish.)

It is evident that the PRR fleet was considerably different from the national average — as is true for almost all railroads, due to traffic differences.

(To be complete, let me add that the national car fleet graph, above at left, is somewhat misleading in that nearly all tank cars, and a substantial number of refrigerator cars, were privately owned, so no railroad could be expected to have a fleet car distribution like the national average. But for the present discussion, about the first three bars at the left of both graphs, that’s not an issue.)

Now let’s look at the gondolas. As with many PRR car groups, the very numerous survivors of car classes built in the 1920s and before largely disappeared after World War II, and newer cars dominated the fleet in turn. In this instance, it is the GR and GS classes, totally dominant in 1939, that were almost entirely replaced by 1955.

One can readily see from the graph above that postwar gondola modeling should emphasize G22, G27 and G31 classes. In the present post, I only want to address Class G22.

This class, 46 feet long inside, was the first gondola that long in the PRR fleet, and one of the earliest in the United States. Generally similar to its predecessor, Class GS, it had 12 side stakes on account of its length, compared to 10 side stakes on the 38-foot GS cars. Built during 1915–1917, the design was well enough respected to become the basis for the USRA 70-ton gondola. The photo below of PRR 352068 is from the Joe Collias collection, and was taken at East St. Louis in 1939.

There has long been a very nice Westerfield resin kit for this car in HO scale (kit 1201), and in fact Richard Hendrickson’s review of that kit contains one of the best summaries of prototype information on the car class (Prototype Modeler, Jan.-Feb. 1984, page 42). Shown below is my model of this class, PRR 315287, shown on the Shumala passing siding of Southern Pacific’s Coast Line on my layout. In 1953, the year I model, there were still more than 4200 of these distinctive gondolas in service on the PRR (not counting those modified for container service).

This distinct low-side gondola is an interesting and welcome addition to my freight car fleet. That’s not only because it was a landmark in gondola design history, but also because it models a nationally significant gondola in its sheer numbers.

Tony Thompson

Choosing new cars for your fleet

This topic probably sounds like the series of posts I have written over the years, about what a car fleet should contain. The most recent of these summarized some of the principles I apply to this problem, for car fleets as a whole, and it can be found here: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2019/05/more-on-choosing-car-fleet.html . But that is not today’s topic.
     Instead,  I am responding to an interesting question I received by email. It asked, essentially, “when a new freight car comes out, how do you decide if you can use it, and which road name(s)?” This of course touches on the previous posts about overall car fleets, but not directly. So I thought a little about how I have in fact made decisions of this kind. (And I won’t include impulse or “gotta have one” decisions . . .)
     I will use as an illustration, the just-out announcement by Rapido Trains that they will be producing an HO scale USRA (United States Railroad Administration) box car, of 40-ton, double-sheathed design. Like the other USRA cars, this car was designed by a high-level committee of experienced railroad mechanical people, and was certainly a successful and durable box car. There were almost 25,000 of them produced, eventually allocated to some 21 railroads and their subsidiaries.
     This wide range of prototype owners of the car means it’s a terrific choice for Rapido to produce, and we know they make excellent products. (To see their announcement, you can visit this page: https://www.rapidotrains.com/products/ho-scale/freight-cars/ho-scale-usra-double-sheathed-wood-boxcar .) Of course, the model is hardly a novelty. Good versions of this box car have been available in resin for years from Westerfield and Funaro & Camerlengo, and Accurail makes a quite decent styrene version. Even the much-mocked Ertl styrene USRA box car was a decent starting point for upgrading or redetailing.
     But let’s examine the options presented by Rapido. Below is a photo of one of the prototype sample cars, produced in 1918 at the beginning of USRA manufacturing by American Car & Foundry, clearly showing the 5-5-5 corrugated steel end and Andrews trucks, as well as general car appearance (AC&F photo).

     Now the question is, can I use one (or more) of the Rapido models? This depends on several factors, in my mind. First, I want to look at the railroads for which Rapido will letter the cars, and see if those are railroads for which I could use additional cars (that goes back to the general car fleet approach mentioned in the first paragraph, top). Second, I want to look at how many USRA 40-ton box cars those railroads received, to see if the number amounts to a credible choice. The Kansas City Southern, for example, only received 100 of these cars, thus statistically not too visible.
     And third, this being a World War I-era design, how well did the cars survive on any railroad I would be interested in? An example might be Wabash, which originally got 3000 of these cars, but by 1953, only 54 cars remained. (My modeling year is 1953.) That wouldn’t be a good choice, for the same statistical reason mentioned in connection with KCS.
     But where am I getting this information? First, I rely on James E. Lane’s excellent article on all the USRA cars, published in Railroad History (the journal of the Railway and Locomotive Historical Society) in issue 128, back in 1973. You can find this publication used from on-line booksellers. Lane tabulates all the final allocations of each USRA car type, including of course the 40-ton box cars, and the railroad number series for each.
     Second, I turn to my copy of the January 1953 issue of the Official Railway Equipment Register or ORER (an NMRA reprint), which is also readily available used. Since Lane provides the number series of the USRA cars on each railroad, one merely has to consult the ORER and see how many were still around by the time I model. As an example, in contrast to  my Wabash example above, is the Rock Island, originally the recipient of 2500 cars, and with 773 still in service by 1953.
     And third, there is a magisterial article by Pat Wider, published in Railway Prototype Cyclopedia (RPC) volume 16 in 2007, that contains not only roster information but numerous large-format photos of the cars of practically all recipients of these cars. (Incidentally, Mr. Wider followed up with an equally extensive and complete article about the steel rebuilds of these USRA cars in RPC 24.)
     It’s logical that the poorer railroads (like Rock Island) would be more likely to hang onto an older box car like this would be in 1953, neither rebuilding it to more modern standards nor scrapping it. Also logical is that any railroad fond of wooden box cars might keep them a long time, too. So Great Northern, originally allocated 1500 cars, still had 1222 of them in service in 1953.
     On the other hand, large recipients Santa Fe and Pere Marquette had none of these cars still in service (in original form) after World War II. The Santa Fe, with originally 2700 cars in their class Bx-2, had rebuilt all of the surviving ones into steel-sheathed cars by 1942. Another example would be the St. Louis–San Francisco, the post-WW II survivors of whose 3500-car allocation had also been rebuilt with steel sides.
     So my leanings at this point are toward Rock Island, for which I could use another car, and Great Northern, for which I don’t really need more cars, but one would certainly fit.
     There’s a third example that is tempting, namely that Rapido will offer two paint schemes of the Toronto, Hamilton and Buffalo (TH&B), which did indeed receive 300 second-hand USRA 40-ton box cars in 1941 from the New York Central (NYC was a half-owner of TH&B). Of the 300 cars, 253 were still listed in the 1953 ORER. The problem there is that Canadian cars seem to have operated in the U.S. in fairly small fractions of their total Canadian fleet size, ten percent in one estimate.
     So to sum up, my approach to new freight car offerings is that I would examine any new model on the basis of the railroads (and paint schemes) offered, in terms of my existing car fleet, along with how many of the particular car were still in service on that railroad in my modeling year of 1953. There are ample resources around to make these kinds of determinations, I enjoy using them, and I don’t hesitate to dig into them to help me make decisions.
Tony Thompson

Southern Pacific’s postwar flat cars

By “postwar,” readers of this blog will likely realize I mean after World War II, since I model 1953. At the time of the war, Southern Pacific had a large but aging fleet of flat cars built in the 1920s, many of which were only 40 feet long. Current practice by this time had pretty much standardized on a length of 53 feet, 6 inches. Moreover, SP’s older cars were almost entirely of 50-ton capacity, while the national standard was becoming the 70-ton size. During World War II, SP built about 250 flat cars in company shops at Sacramento, and bought 300 more from Pacific Car & Foundry, spread over three car classes. All were 70-ton cars and most were 53 ft., 6 in. long (some were 60 feet long).
     But these new cars did not come close to meeting needs, especially for lumber shipments. Lumber traffic was booming after World War II in response to a national home-building boom, particularly in the Far West. In 1948, SP turned to American Car & Foundry for  more cars, and the car design seems to have been largely by AC&F. The first 500 new cars (Class F-70-6) included 100 cars for T&NO. That class was followed by the huge Class F-70-7, 2050 cars built between October 1949 and April of 1950, all for Pacific Lines. They were largely indistinguishable from Class F-70-6, so the two classes, totaling 2550 flat cars, are essential to an SP freight car fleet.
     Here is an interesting photo of one of the F-70-7 cars, in service with a partial load of Allis-Chalmers tractors. The tractors are loaded alternately facing in each direction. It appears that a full load would have been ten tractors; six remain. Modelers not wishing to model a full load of this kind can accordingly just model as many as convenient. (Photo is from the Arnold Menke collection, taken at Ithaca, New York on April 16, 1950.)

     Sandwiched between those two purchases of 70-ton cars was a class of 50-ton cars, Class F-50-16, this time 600 cars with 100 of them for T&NO. Their overall appearance and design was just like the two classes of 70-ton cars, but they were only 40 feet long. And at the end of 1953, SP company shops embarked on construction of another 70-ton class, Class F-70-10, totaling 1000 cars. These were copies of the AC&F-design F-70-6 and -7, but all-welded instead of mostly riveted in construction.
     (All this history and more is encapsulated in Chapter 12 of the third volume, “Automobile Cars and Flat Cars,” in my series, Southern Pacific Freight Cars, published by Signature Press in 2004. Unfortunately, it is currently out of print, though obtainable on the used book market.) Shown below is a summary table of these flat car classes. (You can click on the image to enlarge it if you wish.)

     For modelers, it is vital to recognize that Red Caboose produced an excellent model of Class F-70-7, and sold them for some years in lettering for both pre-1956 car numbers, and post-1956 renumbering. (I reviewed this kit when it was released, in an article in Railmodel Journal, January 2005, pp. 14–17.) This kit can of course also be lettered for Class F-70-6. When Red Caboose went out of business, much of their line was absorbed by InterMountain, but in the case of these flat cars, the dies were purchased by the Southern Pacific Historical and Technical Society (SPH&TS).
     The Society has not only produced cars from time to time, but has also produced kits for the bulkheads applied to these cars in various years (see for example the prototype information and also examples of the SPH&TS bulkhead kits, in my post at: http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2012/07/modeling-sps-bulkhead-flat-cars.html ). A photo of one of the Class F-70-6 flat cars, with the 1949 bulkhead design on it, is below.

The plasterboard load was made by Jim Elliot.
      The SPH&TS has offered a kit for the piggyback hardware used on these cars. The SPH&TS has also produced a kit for the F-70-10 welded cars, and currently markets a kit for that car with piggyback gear included (the announcement can be found at this link: https://sphts.myshopify.com/products/1956-f-70-10-piggyback-flat-car-kit ).
     If you scroll to the bottom of the page in the link just cited, you will also find kits for both 1953 and 1956 number series on the F-70-10 flat car itself, for an undecorated F-70-7 car, and for a piggyback-hardware version of the F-70-7. There also are available kits for the two later designs of flatcar bulkheads, the 1956 and 1962 versions; scroll down a ways on this page: https://sphts.myshopify.com/collections/models .
     Shown below is one of the kits, which happens to be a Class F-70-7 with piggyback gear. It comes with all parts, in a plastic bag as shown.

     Lastly, I should say a bit more about the F-50-10 class. Although, as I stated above, SP copied many features of the F-70-7 cars, they made one significant change. They lowered the sills, relative to the trucks, so that the deck could be flush with the top of the bolster. This meant that the top of the bolster and draft gear box were exposed on the deck. You can see this in the photo below (SP photo), showing car 563220, built as SP 143008. Again, you can click to enlarge.

This means that the F-70-7 and F-70-10 do not only differ by the presence of rivets in the former, but also in the deck. You cannot model a -10 car simply by shaving the rivets off of a -7 model.
     Another point about modeling is that you can fairly easily cut down a Class F-70-7 car to make a 40-foot car of Class F-50-16, but that’s a topic for a future post.
     My main point in this post is that the very important postwar SP flat cars, of classes F-70-6, F-70-7 and F-70-10, can readily be modeled with the various products of the SPH&TS. This includes not only the general service flat cars, but also the bulkhead cars and the piggyback cars. This is a major part of the SP transition-era flat car fleet and, as I said, essential for SP modelers of that era.
Tony Thompson

Terrific new book on freight cars

I have just received my copy of Steve Hile’s new book on UTLX tank cars. It is a superb collection of information and photos, and anyone interested at all in steam era and transition era freight cars will find it both interesting and most informative. The publisher is Speedwitch Media and the cover price is $85. The cover is shown below. You can purchase the book online at the Speedwitch site, www.speedwitchmedia.com .

This is an 8.6 x 11-inch hardbound book, with 278 photos and 36 drawings (complete cars and car details) in its 246 pages. It covers the span of time from the beginning of the 20th century, to 1952.
     Why is this book important? For one thing, in 1950 the UTLX fleet was the largest group of tank cars in North America, with about 38,700 cars. General American, then the predominant leasing company, was right behind at 37,500 cars, with Shippers Car Line (the leasing arm of American Car & Foundry) a distant third at 7,500 cars. (The largest railroad fleet at that time, Santa Fe, was a mere 3,570 cars.) Within the UTLX fleet, one design type, the Class X-3, comprised about 18,000 cars, nearly half the fleet, though these cars were of several different sizes. A car fleet like this simply begs to be described and understood.
     Union Tank Line, as most readers know, was an important component of the Standard Oil trust before its breakup in 1911. Thereafter, Union continued as an independent company, but like many of the “baby Standards” after the breakup, retained very cordial relations with its former Standard brethren. For decades after 1911, many refineries of Standard Oil descendants continued to be served almost exclusively by UTL tank cars.
     Steve Hile explains in the book that he did get some research assistance from Union Tank Car Company, still in business today, though most of their older records are long gone. They did provide a substantial number of excellent photos, nearly all of which are previously unpublished. The roster information in the book, a great assist to the prototype modeler, had to be pieced together from a variety of sources, because the original UTL data no longer exist. But the rosters are a great addition to our knowledge, even if a few gaps remain in the information.
     The book has only a limited amount of color photography, though for subject matter which was painted black, this is not a serious limitation. Photographs in the book are printed at a size which is very helpful for studying details. I show below a sample spread across two pages (pages 86 and 87), and you can see the point I am making.

     There are so many things that a tank car enthusiast can learn in this book, more than I could begin to present here. But I will show one example of a favorite photo in the book, taken at Frankfort, Michigan about 1950. It shows a workman placing the sump pipe into a tank car for top unloading at an oil dealer, using the standpipe behind him. Note that the standpipe has a red pipe and a green pipe, presumably for different products. In the foreground is a 1947 Ford truck, lettered for Standard Oil of Indiana, which may have brought the workman to the site. (The photo is from the UTLX Collection.)

     In his acknowledgements, author Steve Hile credits the late Richard Hendrickson with getting him started on an interest in UTLX cars, as well as supplying information and photos for the book. The result of Steve’s work is a book that Richard would have been delighted to see. It is exactly what he believed the hobby needed: complete and accurate information on the prototype.
     This is a great book for freight car people, and I cannot recommend it highly enough. Publisher Ted Culotta of Speedwitch, along with author Hile, deserves great credit for bringing this book to us all. Warm thanks to you both.
Tony Thompson

Adding 40-foot flat cars, Part 2

I began this thread by describing needs of my freight car fleet for additional 40-foot flat cars with fishbelly side sills, such as the USRA flat car design, available in a very nice kit by Red Caboose. This is a straightforward kit, so my assembly of it was not described, except to point out where I deviated from the standard assembly process. You can read that first post at this link: http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2018/07/adding-some-40-foot-flat-cars.html .
     There are some interesting details to this kit, which offer an opportunity for the modeler to make a variety of changes in its appearance. For example, during the kit assembly, once the stake pockets are installed but before details like grab irons and sill steps are attached, it is worth deciding about a couple of common prototype details that you can add. One of these, that is pretty visible on a flat car, is the brake wheel and staff. We are accustomed to vertical brake staffs, and model flat cars are usually modeled with the brake staff fully extended. But most railroads purchased a drop-staff mechanism for these cars, permitting the brake staff to be dropped down out of the way of long loads.
     Shown below is one example of such a mechanism, this one from Universal Draft Gear Attachment Company. It has a simple locking device which permits the brake staff to be at full height, or for the wheel to be down onto the platform of the flat car, with the shaft still clear of the rail head.

This photo is from the 1928 Car Builders’ Cyclopedia, page 1129.
     This particular drop-shaft arrangement does not have a pocket in the car decking so the wheel can lie flush with the deck top, but the wheel simply rests atop the planking. But a car purchaser could specify that such a pocket be built on the car, if flush placement was desired. For the modeler, it is the work of a few minutes to cut a semi-circular pocket in the end decking.
     It might be noticed by the experienced modeler, that the Red Caboose flat car is designed so the brake staff is near the outside edge of the car end. This was indeed the arrangement on the New York Central flat cars, which are effectively the prototype for this kit. Shown below is a NYC photo of one of the cars of Lot 598-F, when the 300 cars were new in 1930, and the brake staff location is evident.

The photo is a NYC company image, from the John C. LaRue collection, courtesy Richard Hendrickson. (The car was black when built, with an “S” preceding the car number, but by the 1940s both features were gone, and these cars became boxcar red.)
     Most flat cars, however, had the brake gear near the car centerline, as was true on most other freight cars, too. Shown below is an example for a flat car (it happens to be an SP photo of Class F-70-5, and the brake shaft is a drop type). If the railroad you are modeling located its brake gear this way, you may want to modify your Red Caboose kit accordingly. Note also that here the end grab irons are farther from the coupler pocket than on the Red Caboose USRA kit.

I am modeling one New York Central car, for which I will place the brake staff as the kit directs, and one car for Chicago & North Western, for which I will move the staff to the location you see above.
     Freight cars almost always had route card boards. Red Caboose supplies none, perhaps a wise choice, since every railroad seemed to have its own standard location. Prototype photos are your friend in finding out where your model should have these. The NYC cars had them either between the right-hand pair of stake pockets, or between the third and fourth pockets (see photo above). I just used a piece of scale 2 x 6-inch styrene strip.

     Another feature commonly seen but not included in the Red Caboose kit (nor in the USRA design drawings) is end stake pockets. Most railroads specified these for most of the flat cars they purchased or built in home shops. They are readily added by drilling a no. 55 hole, then squaring its shape with a square needle file. It just takes a minute.
     When both the end stake pockets, and also the recess for the dropped brake wheel, are added, you can achieve an appearance like the photo below. And you may recognize that modeling the lowered brake wheel, in addition to being a fairly common prototype sight, also removes the vulnerable tall brake staff from your model. (Note, too, the easily achieved irregular plank ends on the decking.) The lowered brake staff is just visible below the brake wheel. The end grab irons are in the kit location.

     With these details taken care of, I can move on to final decoration of the model. That will be presented in a following post.
Tony Thompson

The Speedwitch freight car books

The title refers to a series of books published by Speedwitch Media, Ted Culotta’s company, with the series title Focus on Freight Cars. These present an excellent collection of very high-quality photographs taken in the Los Angeles area in the late 1930s, reportedly by one or more persons planning to develop scale model railroad products. Accordingly, many of them emphasize details of the cars along with portrait views.
     Below is a list of the eight volumes published to date. The only ones that I know are out of stock are Volumes 3 and 4, and I understand both are going to be reprinted shortly. Further, a friend of mine recently was able to find copies of some of these volumes used, on the internet, so any not currently available from Speedwitch can be sought in that way. For more information or to purchase, you can visit Speedwitch at: http://speedwitchmedia.com/books-journals/ .

• Focus on Freight Cars, Volume One: Single Sheathed Box & Automobile Cars
• Focus on Freight Cars, Volume Two: Double Sheathed Box & Automobile Cars
• Focus on Freight Cars, Volume Three: Refrigerator Cars
• Focus on Freight Cars, Volume Four: Steel Box Cars
• Focus on Freight Cars, Volume Five: Steel Automobile Cars
• Focus on Freight Cars, Volume Six: Refrigerator Cars 2
• Focus on Freight Cars, Volume Seven: Rebuilt Box and Automobile Cars
• Focus on Freight Cars, Volume Eight: Refrigerator Cars 3

You will notice that there have been three volumes on refrigerator cars, and the forthcoming Volume 9 will be a second volume on single-sheathed box and automobile cars, following Volume 1. Most of these list for $42, though new ones (several more are planned) are often offered at an advantageous pre-publication price. It’s worth keeping an eye on the Speedwitch site to learn of new additions to the series.
     The first two volumes were written by Richard Hendrickson, and all the ones published subsequently are by Ted Culotta. Were Richard still alive, I strongly suspect he would be continuing as author, but Ted is doing the job in Richard’s absence.
     I don’t wish to present all of these publications, but want to show a few covers just as illustrations. Shown below are volumes 3 and 5.

Following on to those volumes, as shown below were volumes 7 and 8. All these books are perfect bound, 8.5 x 11 inches in size, and contain 84 to 104 pages.

     These books are a marvelous resource for modelers of eras from the middle to late 1930s, until at least the end of the 1950s. You simply will not see better quality photos nor anywhere near this level of detail. I highly recommend them to anyone interested in freight cars. Likely I need not even mention these titles to true aficionados, who will not only know of these books, but will own the full set, as I do. But for everyone else, do consider buying a volume or two and see what you think.
Tony Thompson