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Getting Real Column - 9
(Speedwitch Media, 2004) by Ted Culotta. On the Missouri
Pacific, by 1953 almost 3100 of the original 3250 cars remained
in service (11).
For the gondola model, I used Sunshine kit 1.1 (their very first
kit), which I reviewed back in January of 1990 for
Railroad
Model Craftsman
(Vol. 58, No. 8, pages 104–109), and in that
review I described the construction process. I used Athearn
AAR trucks and Kadee couplers and wheelsets.
The 1932 ARA boxcar design with Dreadnaught ends is well-
represented by the Atlas styrene model. The one I acquired
was lettered for International-Great Northern, from the first
group purchased by Mopac. The I-GN cars were numbered
17001–17300, and were built by American Car & Foundry in
1936. I added weathering, chalk marks, and route cards to this
ready-to-run model (11).
12: The Great Northern chose to build its 1937 AAR
standard boxcars with tongue-and-groove wood
side sheathing. This Sunshine resin model captures
all the details of that distinctive car, along with the
“front-facing goat” emblem in use when the car was
built in 1937.
12
Another road for which I have carefully chosen freight cars is
the Great Northern, whose freight car fleet was one of the top
15 in size, as I showed in my Dec. 2011 MRH column. Here I
will just mention two. A distinctive and eye-catching part of
the GN freight car fleet was the 1937 Association of American
Railroads (AAR) design, which GN chose to build with wood
side sheathing. My second choice was the postwar 12-panel
steel boxcars, of which GN built about 3500 cars.
Information on both of these cars, and many other GN freight
cars, is very nicely summarized in a book chapter about
GN freight equipment, by Richard Hendrickson and Staffan
Ehnbom; that chapter is in Patrick Dorin’s book,
Great Northern
Lines East
(Signature Press, 2001, Chapter 6). The wood-
sheathed AAR cars are described in Pat Wider’s article which
13: This model of a 12-panel Great Northern boxcar,
with a diagonal-panel roof, represents thousands of
such cars built by and for GN after World War II. It has
Pennsylvania Railroad (off-line) reweigh and repacking
data from a Sunshine decal set.
13
MRH-Apr 2013
