Did the Con-Cor fifty-foot flatcars ever have any prototypes? I've been doing research on freight cars that the Southern Pacific Railroad would have been using in 1946, the year that the "Daylight" was at the height of its popularity as (Kato replicates in N-scale). The only two purely-SP (no subsidiaries or affiliates) N-scale freight cars that I have found and that I know aren't "stand-ins" or cars with inaccurate and/or missing details are the boxcars using the 1937 AAR forty-foot standard design with "SP" lettering on the sides as released five years ago from InterMountain and this fifty-foot flatcar with fish-belly sides and wooden deck from Con-Cor that was released in 1979. The car's number is 583077, but I couldn't find any record of this car having existed in real life anywhere on the Internet. What I want to know is did the SP actually have a flatcar with this number in real life and also what the prototype for the Con-Cor fifty-foot flatcar was should the SP not actually have such a car or at least one with the design in question?
Are you a NMRA member? The Kalmbach Library has a copy of the April 1946 Official Railway Equipment Register. Contact NMRA HQ to see if you can get them to copy the SP entry for you
BEAUSABREThe Kalmbach Library has a copy of the April 1946 Official Railway Equipment Register. Contact NMRA HQ to see if you can get them to copy the SP entry for you
-Matt
Returning to model railroading after 40 years and taking unconscionable liberties with the SP&S, Northern Pacific and Great Northern roads in the '40s and '50s.
crossthedog BEAUSABRE The Kalmbach Library has a copy of the April 1946 Official Railway Equipment Register. Contact NMRA HQ to see if you can get them to copy the SP entry for you Wo. That's cool. Does the Official Railway Equipment Register catalog the equipment for ALL roads for a given year? Like would it have Spokane Portland & Seattle? -Matt
BEAUSABRE The Kalmbach Library has a copy of the April 1946 Official Railway Equipment Register. Contact NMRA HQ to see if you can get them to copy the SP entry for you
Wo. That's cool. Does the Official Railway Equipment Register catalog the equipment for ALL roads for a given year? Like would it have Spokane Portland & Seattle?
The short answer to the question is no, SP583077 is not a valid number for an SP flat car of any length according to the 1943, 1953 and 1971 ORER's.
According to the 1943 ORER the SP had 50 ft flats in the 43091-43190, 43791-44090 series and 52 ft flats in the 49480-49678, 79501-79699 series, for a total of about 770 cars.
Dave H. Painted side goes up. My website : wnbranch.com
Apparently what you have is a PRR Class F30d piggyback car Con-Cor (USA) 50' TOFC Flat Car (spookshow.net). Here's the PRR diagram and photos
I’m not sure if the OP is aware of these two sites, which may help him with future research...
http://www.spookshow.net/
"One difference between pessimists and optimists is that while pessimists are more often right, optimists have far more fun."
Okay, I just wanted to be sure since I couldn't be too careful. Thanks.
Thanks. If I had been aware of that page at Spookshow, I would have known, but at least I now know that the SP-painted car is neither a prototype nor a stand-in but a good "what-if," as in what an SP-painted version of this car would have looked like.
Wilson, SP could have had the cast version of the car. General Steel Castings produced a line of car bodies that the railroad shops could turn into a car by adding trucks and brake gear, then sending that over to the paint shop. The great advantage of cast cars was that; unlike fabricated cars, there were no rivets or bolts to work loose under the impacts of normal use. Eventually, welding replaced castings as it was cheaper and just as solid, but railroads didn't trust it originally, as it was new technology. For example, EMD's first switchers were the 600 hp SC and SW and the 900 hp NC and NW. The first letter designating the horsepower and the second the way the frame was constructed. GSC (Granite City, IL) was jointly owned by locomootive builders Alco and Baldwin and its specialty was large complex castings. Its bread and butter were cast locomotive frames, which greatly reduced maintenance costs on steam which tries to tear itself apart as the moving parts can't be be perfectly balanced. This resulted in fabricated frames lossening their rivets and getting out of alignment with BAD effects on pistons, valves and rods. Here is a GSC frame for a SNCF Class 141R "Liberation" 2-8-2 which the US supplied to France after WW2 to rebuild their railroad system, which had almost been destroyed during the fighting. French railroaders had their doubts as the US and French design philosophies were so ditfferent, but those who came to jeer remained to cheer. "Les Americains" became well liked and were the last steam in revenue serice in France. During WW2, GSC produced cast turrets for all models of the M4 medium tank and the hulls of the M4A2 variant, recognizable by its curved contours. GSC stayed in the tank busines after the war. As a matter of fact. all the tanks I served on prior to the M1 had GSC turrets and hulls, identifiable by their trademark cast into them
BEAUSABREApparently what you have is a PRR Class F30d piggyback car
No, the model absolutely does not match a PRR F30
Chris van der Heide
My Algoma Central Railway Modeling Blog
OK, what are the differences?
BEAUSABRE OK, what are the differences?
Everything, apart from them both being flatcars?
Start with the cast and welded frames on the F30 and subclasses vs. a rather conventional riveted body on the Concor model. Different profile to the side fishbelly. No giant stand for the brake wheel off the side. Other minor details differing.
For the F30D modified for TOFC service, the complete lack of the prototype rub rails above the stake pockets, missing safety stakes and different deck configuration. The model doesn't even have the drop bridge plates on the end of the car that any TOFC car meant for ramp loading would have.
Walthers LifeLike Proto 2000 offered a fairly decent HO model of a cast 52'6" flatcar, and the kit included a fair amount of detail parts if you wanted to convert it to TOFC service.
I can't say how prototypical they were, but they apparently weren't all that popular, as the hobbyshop that I frequented at that time actually put them on sale, a practice in which they seldom participated. (Their sale items were usually kits that buyers couldn't complete properly, so turned them in for sale on the store's "used table"...I picked-up a lot of botched LifeLike Proto 2000 kits at bargain prices, replacing the small plastic detail parts (usually broken, missing, or half-buried in tube-type glue) using Tichy phosphor bronze wire.When the Proto2000 cars re-appeared as r-t-r cars, I picked-up quite a few of the kits, unopened because many of the modellers preferred to not "roll their own".
Here's one of the undecorated flat cars, painted and re-lettered for one of my freelanced roads...
While the kits did include a steel weight, I opted to better the tracking qualities by adding cast-lead weights, meant to fit into the plastic underframe, which represented a cast-metal one...
Since my layout is set in the late '30s, I didn't convert any of my bargain flatcars for TOFC, as it wasn't, at that time, all that common.I still have some of the detail parts for TOFC, though (mostly the ramps), but used some of the rub-rail material as trim for the soffits on the road's Paint Shop...
When the LifeLike Proto -2000 r-t-r cars became available, I also picked up quite a few NIB kits for tank cars and gondolas, pretty-well all at half-price (and later even less).
Wayne