Page 66 - 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 ...”
MRH-Apr 2013
