The Postwar Freight Car Fleet

In this post we'll dig further into Larry's research, and also grab some information from a book by Larry Kline and Ted Culotta, The Post War Freight Car Fleet. This is an indispensable resource with lots of good information along with the core of the book, a series of photographs of freight cars all taken at the same time and place. Even better, it's still available from the NMRA.

There are far too many prototypes to list from the book. But there is a lot of interesting information presented that will help identify the projects that have priority.

For example, more than 3/4 of box cars are owned by the top twenty Class I owners in 1950. Of those roads (note that it doesn't include Canadian roads), let's look at the percentage of those cars that are single sheathed cars:

1. NYC - <1% 
2. PRR - 10%
3. ATSF - 22%
4. SP/T&NO - 26% / 39%
5. MILW - 54%
6. B&O - 2%
7. C&NW - 52%
8. UP - <1%
9. SOU - 0%
10. MP/I-GN - 66% / 68%
11. CB&Q - 51%
12. GN - 16%
13. C&O, PM - 3% / 28%
14. IC - 40%
15. NP - 22%
16. RI - 49%
17. ACL - <1%
18. SL-SF - 71%
19. SAL - 27%
20. L&N - 51%

How well are these rosters of box cars represented in plastic models?

Let's look at the USRA Single Sheathed Boxcar:

These are the cars still on the road in 1949, according to John Nehrich on the NEB&W Railroad Heritage site.

ACL - 22
AA - 192
B&O - 480
C&O - 3
CNW - 863
CRR - 276
D&H - 459
MEC - 259
MILW - 2,442
NYC - 6
N&W - 691
PRR - 5,721
RDG - 76
RF&P - 284
SP - 656

12,430, or less than 8% of the total of 162,817 single sheathed box cars in 1950 (not including Canadian cars) according to Larry Ostrech's research.

Furthermore, of the 13 top 20 box car owning railroads in 1950 whose roster included 20% or more single sheathed cars, only MILW, and SP are represented by the USRA cars. The Mather single sheathed car doesn't include any of these roads either, and is accurate for a portion of the 10,000 or so Mather box cars. The Intermountain "War Emergency" car is accurate for ATSF and CNW, but it represents a small portion of their single sheathed roster.

So, considering just 40' single sheathed box cars, the existing models for US roads are good for 15-20% of all single sheathed cars in 1950. And of the roads that had the most single sheathed box cars, the models represent less than 5% of the most common single sheathed cars.

Clearly its impossible to get a representative mix of cars c1950 using only plastic models.