Page 34 - 38. MRH13-04-Apr2013
Basic HTML Version
would the USRA (United States Railway Administration) single-
sheathed boxcars owned by the Milwaukee; they owned 4000
of them, out of a total production of 25,000 of those boxcars
built under the USRA. These USRA cars were a dominant part
of the Milwaukee fleet for years.
The foregoing comments illustrate the kind of evaluation I like
to do in choosing model freight cars for railroads other than
my “home road,” Southern Pacific, in the early 1950s. In what
follows, I will describe single cars or pairs of cars, which I have
chosen for their signature qualities, owned by various railroads
other than SP, and show the HO scale models which corre-
spond. As part of the description, I will also allude to sources of
information you can use to understand these cars. My choices
are of course personal, but with information resources like
these, you can make your own selections.
An important part of these foreign car selections is the idea
that most railroads would be represented everywhere in the
country in proportion to the relative size of their fleet of freight
cars. This idea was developed by Tim Gilbert and Dave Nelson.
I presented that idea in my “Getting Real” column in
Model
Railroad Hobbyist,
for December 2011, page 33
. Accordingly, I have approximately
scaled my selections in this column to the freight car fleet sizes
shown in Figure 1 of that column. These fleet sizes all reflect
removal of hopper, ore and ballast car numbers from total fleet
size, since in general those car types are interchanged much
less than other freight cars, particularly so for western roads.
Getting Real Column - 2
“An important part of these foreign car
selections is the idea that most railroads would
be represented everywhere in the country ...”
One important source of information about prototype freight
cars is the
Official Railway Equipment Register
, or ORER, issued
monthly before the Depression and quarterly since that time.
Copies from various years can often be obtained from sell-
ers of railroadiana and railroad paper, but another source is
the National Model Railroad Association (NMRA), which has
reprinted the January issues for 1943 and 1953. Both are
sometimes obtainable from used booksellers online, and the
1953 issue is still available from NMRA. Some libraries also
hold ORER issues. Wherever you find ORERs, the point is that
the exact size and makeup of each railroad’s freight car fleet is
shown in each ORER issue.
I have omitted from this column some of the largest and most
familiar railroads, such as Santa Fe, New York Central, and
Pennsylvania (three of the four largest American freight car
fleets), just because these roads are generally so well known,
although cars from each of them naturally are well represented
in my own freight car fleet. The roads emphasized in this col-
umn are generally less well known and, I think, less appreciated.
I have also left out the Southern Pacific, which is the home road
for my layout, and the fourth member of the top four.
Since I have already mentioned the Milwaukee Road as an
example, I will begin there. The Milwaukee Road owned a large
fleet of non-hopper freight cars, in fact the fifth largest of all
U.S. railroads (as I showed in my December 2011 column).
“One important source of information about
prototype freight cars is the Official Railway
Equipment Register ...”
MRH-Apr 2013
