Workin'

Yep, that's right.  I've actually been down in the basement working.  The first time since August I think.  I've been relaying the yard,  cleaning and organizing the basement,  tried the airbrush on a few things,  and am experimenting with some scenicking.

Here's a sample for now. The water column is new, painted it (and the concrete base) today with the airbrush. More weathering is needed of course. Playing around with the Scenic Express weeds.

Composite Gondola

There's a thread on the Steam Era Freight Car Group about a composite gondola that looks a lot like the one in this picture. I've been trying to determine the road on this car because I'd like to model it myself. It looks like the Intermountain USRA composite gondola would be a good starting point. We'll see what the experts on the site determine.

New Britain Yard 1949. 

I forget the photographer, it was from a NHRHTA calendar - one of the few I don't have!

Interesting sites

Here's a couple of things I've been meaning to send to the Thursday night guys but decided I might as well share them here for everybody.

More USRA Hopper Info
First is an interesting document from the B&O railroad about rebuilding their hoppers:

http://www.pages.drexel.edu/~nbf23/Keysercardept.pdf

It's a nice companion to a similar book that Pieter has about CNJ/CRP hopper rebuilds.

It's of particular interest now because I'm trying to determine which roads still had USRA hoppers with K-brakes c1947 since the MTH hopper can be used as is for those. So apparently the B&O upgraded theirs to AB brakes, with a horizontal handbrake. I don't see any USRA hoppers (B&O Class N-17) in the pictures but you can see a reweigh date of 1945 on one of them that gives a rough idea of when the rebuilding project was underway.

So, the question is, how many of the USRA hoppers were rebuilt by 1947, and were any still using K-brakes at that time. According to the rosters in B&O modeler Vol 2, No 3  there were 1,853 N-17's in 1948, and 1,764 of them still in service in 1954, the year after K-brakes were outlawed in interchange service. While roads could retain K-brakes for online service only, these numbers were reported in the ORER so they would have been upgraded.

That still doesn't tell me when they were upgraded, but it's a safe bet that the majority of the cars were in the upgrade program. So I'll most likely want to upgrade them to AB Brakes.

The RDG also upgraded theirs, although the confirmed upgrades so far were photographed post '54.

NYC Railroading
I mentioned this site to the guys a while ago and never got around to sending it to them. It's an excellent site on the terminal railroads of NYC. I came across the site because of Dave Ramos's New York Harbor Railroad.

Joseph was also checking it out because one of the things he's thought about modeling is street running and there was a bit in NYC in Brooklyn (which we went to check out on the way to Dave's).

36' Double Sheathed Box Cars

Another post? Wow!

While I was researching hopper rosters I was looking at the various ways John Nehrich has broken down the 1949 fleet of freight cars on the RPI site. Among this data was an interesting tidbit - in 1949 there were approximately 60,000 36' cars on the railroads. Of those, nearly 2/3 are CN and CP Fowler Patent single sheathed box cars. Leaving just 20,000 or so 36' double sheathed cars. About 5,000 of those are ACL and SAL ventilated box cars.

So not many 36' double sheathed cars at all.

Chris pointed out that there would have been more in 1947. So I was curious, and rather than keeping this between the two of us (and also so this info is someplace where I can find it later...), here's what I've compiled (with much thanks for John's research).

RPI Data
The percentage of composite to all steel box cars went from 56% in 1940 to 44% in 1945 and 31% in 1949.

This amounts to about 106,000 cars of a total box car roster of about 700,000+. And that's assuming all of those cars were 36 footers. 

There were still 26,000+ all wood box cars in 1945, with about 7,500 'other' box cars in 1949, so that reduction was most likely all double sheathed cars since I'm not aware of any single sheathed car being made without a steel underframe. And I'm not aware of many 40' all wood cars.

In 1949 there were 60,000 of 223,0000 composite cars were 36' box cars, or about a 1/4. But of those, 40,000 were Fowler patent single sheathed cars. Leaving about 20,000 double sheathed plus the 7,500 'other' cars. That amounts to about 3% of the total box car fleet being under 40' and double sheathed.

So if all of the difference was double sheathed, and the number of Fowler patent cars remained constant, then 36' double sheathed cars would account for about 120,000 of 160,000 composite cars, plus most of the 'other' cars, which amounts to only 19% of the fleet as 36' cars.

Most likely the drop off accelerated instead of being linear. So it's somewhere between 19% and 3%, so 10% of the entire box car fleet as 36' double sheathed cars sounds reasonable. But I'm guessing it's lower.

In 1949, the roads with more than 1,000 cars (not including the CN and CP since they were all single sheathed) - Southern, L&N, NC&StL, D&H, ERIE, and Nationales de Mexico. Adding local roads that had at least 500 there's BAR and DL&W.

ORER Data from 1947
Comparing a few roads between 1947 and 1949:
SOU - 9,228 - 3,928
L&N - 7,438 - 2,829
D&H - 1,751 - 1,560
ERIE - 1,275 - 1,005
BAR - 1,099 - 903
DL&W - 832 - 538
RDG - 2,135 - 223
LNE - 190 - 183  (but these are 39' 10")
NYC - 752 - 156

In 1947 5,407 of these cars were ACL or SAL ventilated box cars.

So obviously some roads were retiring cars faster than others. But I think that up to 10% of box cars being 36' is reasonable.

Models
So how many 36' double sheathed cars do we need? Well, I think that the NH cars being home road cars don't count. We'll need a couple of them for revenue service, and a few more for MOW service. 

I think that specialty cars like the ventilated box cars also don't count, provided we're modeling a season when they would be in use as ventilated box cars. If they are in use as regular box cars then they would be treated as such.

So I think the must have cars are those for direct connections with a decent percentage of 36' double sheathed cars (CV and RDG are both around 25% in 1947). The SOU SU design is also one that was such a large class of cars, and the Southern had the largest number of 36' double sheathed cars even in 1949.

As for other cars I think it depends on whether we identify commodities coming for other roads. Assuming there's a model available, then it's a question of how those cars relate to their larger box car fleet. But these would be low priority cars.

So for Chris' layout this amounts to, well, one 36' double sheathed box car. He's got two trains with 20-25 cars each, and perhaps 30ish cars on the layout. So less than 100 cars.

In my case, I've got 8 trains of 15-25 cars each, plus another 50 or 60 on the layout. So at any given time I'm probably looking at 2-3 36' double sheathed cars in any given session. Of course, on some days there could be more, others less.

F&C has the most 36' double sheathed car models. I've got the CV, NH and NYC

I also have SOU (Westerfield, but F&C makes the same prototype).

The NYC car is a great example of a rare car. Their 1947 roster of 752 36' cars is only 3% of their USRA design steel box cars (25,000+), just one class of steel box cars on the road, or about 1% of their 60,000+ box car fleet.

Roster vs Operating Session
Having said that, I go back to my assertion that there's a difference between your model roster, and the cars you run during a given operating session. I'll use Chris's layout as an example. Until he has an operating Shore Line, he needs about 100 cars for an operating session, probably less. So by our calculations he needs a single 36' double sheathed box car. And that's assuming (as we will for now) that all 100 cars per session are box cars.

So looking at the choices, he decides he likes the CV one. If he has an industry that is directly serviced by an industry on the CV then this is a good choice. I might even argue that it's no longer a rare car, as that industry would have about a 25% of receiving this type of car based on the CV roster (assuming they never use a foreign road car).

Problem is, if this isn't a car in semi-captive service, then this 'rare' car becomes 'common' if we choose to run one 36' car per session and that's the only car available.

So I think that it's worth modeling at least a handful of cars. This is why your roster should be larger than what you'd run in an operating session (or a couple of sessions).

Instead of running one 36' double sheathed box car per 100 cars per session (which would be a statistical anomaly anyway), these cars would simply fall under the 'rare' category. Rare cars could make up 10-20% of the cars used in the session. If we go with 20% then 2 cars of his 100 would be rare. Sometimes one would be a 36' car, sometimes none, sometimes two. In that mix are other rare cars.

One of the main reasons I like this approach is that I like freight cars. It allows me to have more cars, and more unusual cars, than most people would choose to model. But I also think it means that from session to session the mix of cars is good, and individual rare cars continue to be rare.

My initial approach was to model one car per 'x' number of a given car on the prototype. But for large classes of cars (PRR X29 for example) this would require 20+ cars. These are cars that belong in pretty much every ops session. But I can make that happen with far fewer cars. Folks won't remember car numbers from session to session, but they will remember unusual cars.

So now I'm working on finding an upper limit to the number of cars needed for any large class. This will probably vary depending on your prototype (you might need 25 X29s if you model the PRR). It's important to have enough common cars, whether a specific class, or a specific design used by many roads (1937 AAR Standard Box Car).

I suppose that's a next step - figure out what a representative mix of cars is for each session. That's for another post.

More about hoppers

So in the course of getting the LNE hopper project going, I've been doing some research on hoppers in general. I won't pretend to be an expert on hoppers, and there has been a lot published online and in various magazines and books, although I would start with Bob Karig's "Coal Cars: The First 300 Years", John Teichmoeller's "Pennsylvania Railroad Steel Open Hopper Cars", and the various Railway Prototype Cyclopedias, particularly Volume 25. Of course, the RPI Railroad Heritage website should be a primary source for any freight car modeling as well.

I haven't looked into books on the hopper fleets of the B&O or NYC which were both substantial and they would be helpful. But I've been able to find enough online information for now relating to them. The B&O is a particular challenge because there aren't a lot of accurate models for their hoppers. At least not yet.

Based on information provided in several resources, I believe that while hoppers for C&O, N&W and other more southerly roads would have travelled occasionally on the New Haven, I suspect they were in far fewer numbers than the roads I'll cover here. This was largely because coal from these fields came to CT primarily by water. And while NH hoppers have been photographed offline, I suspect a large number of them were used to ship coal from waterborne loads to their final destinations on the NH.

As a starting point, I've been looking at existing models that are available either only in (resin) kit form or simple projects like the LNE one which is primarily upgrading a shake-the-box style model. Initially this is covering twin hoppers (HM), but I'm already looking into triple and quad hopper (HT) projects.

More extensive kitbashing projects will wait. I have already purchased RTR cars that are appropriate and meeting my modeling standards (BLI, Intermountain, Kadee, etc.).

As for the roads that I think are most important for my (and Chris and Pete's) layout are coal hauling roads with direct NH connections:

CNJ/CRP
ERIE
LNE
LV
NYC
O&W
PRR

Secondary sources are the other large roads that have service connections (based on published schedules), photos, and anthracite roads:
B&O
D&H
DL&W
RDG

Several roads have been bumped up in priority due to the identification of specific brands of coal handled by local New Britain industries:
Stanley Svea - Old Company's Lehigh (D&H, DL&W, LNE)
Household Fuel - Glen Alden Coal Co (CNJ, DL&W, RDG)

So then there's the question of how many of any given hopper I need. For box cars I settled on 1 car per 1,000 rostered for a foreign road car. But then what about cars like the PRR X29 or NYC USRA Design steel box car, each of which rostered over 25,000? I don't really need 25 of each do I?

Probably not. So I think a reasonable goal is around 10 of each. But hoppers aren't as free roaming as box cars. However, I also think that for a bulk commodity it's common to see a string of 2-3 cars, even if it's a road with a small roster. That doesn't mean they'll all be the same prototype.

So I know I'll do at least two cars for each of the target roads, but typically more. I've settled on 1 car for each 500 rostered to try to get the mix right for each road that has multiple prototypes available. But I think 3 to 4 of a given prototype will probably be sufficient, with more for particularly large rosters (PRR, basically). I may make exceptions for roads that serve mines that I know are selling to New Britain industries.

For retail industries I haven't determined a specific brand of coal (Shurberg & Sons,) I'll focus on anthracite roads, and the large industries (Stanley, Russell & Erwin, etc.) will receive bituminous, often in triple and quad hoppers, from B&O, NYC, PRR, etc.

 As noted, the first project we're starting is the LNE AAR Standard cars.

Fishbelly Hoppers
Next will probably be cars based on the Bowser (ex-Stewart) fishbelly hoppers, and as long as we can find the proper decorated cars, these won't require decals.
CNJ 67000-67999 (1)
CRP 67000-67999 (1)
D&H 4701-6100 (2-4)
LV 25000-25499, 25500-25939 (2)
RDG 65000-65999, 67000-67338, 80000-80999 (4-6), plus 1-2 of the F&C War Emergency variation (66000-66999)

USRA and USRA Clone Hoppers
I've got Accurail, Tichy and MTH USRA hoppers, and I've settled on making some modifications (modernizing) the MTH model, primarily upgrading to AB brakes. These will definitely need painting and lettering.
B&O (2-4)
CNJ (1)
CRP (1)
D&H (1, plus one Tichy panel side rebuild)
DL&W (2)
NH (2-4)
NYC (4, plus two Tichy panel side rebuilds)
RDG (2-4)

GL hoppers (Westerfield and/or F&C) - mostly GLca class, and the majority (if not all) will be the excellent F&C one piece body kit.
PRR (5-10)

GLA and 1905 "Common Design" (Westerfield and/or Bowser)
Note: while individual roads had some specific variations, the main difference was apparently the angle of the center slope sheets. PRR had a 30 degree angle, and most others a 45 degree angle. I'm not sure if I'll be able to modify the interior, but the Bowser car is the PRR 30 degree angle so it may be possible (since it's less than 45 degrees). Otherwise, along with the detail upgrades the rivet line in the middle of the car will be modified.

Chris has a photo of a PRR H21 at Wethersfield coal, and found that Bowser makes a model (yay!) but it has molded on parts (boo!). I pointed out that they had over 25,000 H21's c1947 and that he had a choice - build a half-dozen or more Westerfield kits, or start shaving Bowser cars. He's ready to shave. The same thing applies for the PRR GLA class.

PRR (5-10)
CNJ/CRP (1-2)
LV (4-6)

Berwind-White Mini Project
A few years ago Laura and I went to Newport, RI and one of the mansions we visited was The Elms, the home of Mr. and Mrs. Edward Julius Berwind. So at the very least I'm sure that Berwind coal hoppers would be seen on the New Haven on the Shoreline servicing their home. In addition, there are models available that covers the entire Berwind roster in 1947. So that's kind of fun. One of those kits, now available from F&C, was originally manufactured by Funaro for Yankee Clipper Models, which were produced by Bill Dulmaine, the current President of NHRHTA and he and Cosette are responsible for publishing the Shoreliner.

Mount Vernon Shops makes a set of decals that letters 4 GLca, 6 GLa, and 2 BW-1 hoppers so that will give us enough for the group to split.
GLa (Bowser) 1501-1900, 3351-4980
GLca (F&C) 2001-3000, 4981-5000
BW-1 (F&C) 5001-5050, 5051-5160

Resin Kits
In addition to the GLca and BW-1 hoppers, I'll need several of the F&C CNJ/CRP 9-panel hoppers (the model that started this study, actually), and RDG Channel Side hoppers, also from F&C.

That will get me (us) started, and will provide a solid foundation for the hoppers that I think would represent a proper mix, recognizing that there will be too few B&O and probably DL&W hoppers, among others. Beyond these, I don't have a problem with an occasional visit from other hoppers that would be less common. But we've now found three photos with C&I hoppers on the New Haven so it's clear that there are always interesting cars to include.