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Getting Real Column - 6
accuracy and quality. I did add a route card board to the right of
each car side, using scale 1 x 6-inch styrene, as well as Kadee No.
58 couplers. Otherwise the model is pretty much as-delivered,
with weathering added. It is shown with a coal load.
A railroad of particular importance for SP modelers like me is
the Northern Pacific, with which SP enjoyed a warm and coop-
erative connection at Portland, Oregon. My NP fleet is not lim-
ited to two cars, but I will show here two signature boxcars.
One is from NP’s massive fleet of virtually-identical 40-foot,
double-sheathed cars, numbered 10000–13999 and remaining
in service for many years. In the year I model, 1953, the origi-
nal group of 4000 cars still contained 3809 cars! The first 3000
cars were built in 1923, 30 years earlier, and like so many NP
house cars in that era, had the railroad’s own design of metal-
sheathed “circular” or radial roof. Published coverage of these
cars includes Todd Sullivan’s book,
NP Color Guide to Freight
and Passenger Equipment
(Morning Sun Books, 1995). My
model is from Sunshine resin kit 52.2, built by Dennis Williams
and lettered and finished by me (6).
The Northern Pacific continued to buy thousands of new box
cars of all-steel construction, a substantial number before
World War II of the 1937 AAR design, and many more after
the war, which in appearance were largely conventional.
Among them were the 500 cars obtained from American Car &
Foundry in 1946, equipped with Improved Dreadnaught ends
and numbered 29500–29999, the number group to which
the model I built belongs. Fully 495 of these cars remained in
“A railroad of particular importance for SP
modelers like me is the Northern Pacific ...”
service in 1953. Considerable information about the entire NP
freight car fleet exists in a chapter by Richard Hendrickson, to
be published in a forthcoming book by Patrick Dorin, entitled
Northern Pacific Lines East.
My postwar NP car was built from a
Branchline kit (7).
I’ve also chosen a pair of Seaboard Air Line boxcars for my
fleet. One of them is an example of the 1932 ARA design,
of which Seaboard was the second biggest buyer. The com-
plete story of the 1932 boxcars is told in Ted Culotta’s book,
The American Railway Association Standard Box Car of 1932
(Speedwitch Media, 2004). Seaboard’s purchase of 2000 of
these cars, numbered 17000–18999, was second only to the
Missouri Pacific (and subsidiaries). The Seaboard cars are an
interesting variation of the 1932 design, because the railroad
7: This example of a Northern Pacific postwar boxcar
has the black roof and ends typical of practice at that
time, and is being spotted in a switching move. It was
built from a Branchline styrene kit.
7
MRH-Apr 2013
