I did it!
I've been eyeing a MicroTrains 50' smooth-side Penn Central boxcar at my LHS for some time. At $13.95 (-15% club discount since I've diplayed my layout at his show), it's a fair price indeed.
So today I bought it.
There are some discrepencies from the prototype (most noticble being the door and the style of lettering above the car number):
...but otherwise a beautiful car. I plan to use the lower photo as a weathering guide.
My 5-year-old son is obsessed with Amtrak and with the occasional Conrail GP38-2 used as a helper in and out of our town of Apex, NC (so named because the SAL, now CSX, climbs grades from both sides).
So I thought maybe developing a late PC/early CR/Amtrak roster would help keep my tiny layout interesting until I can go bigger. Who knows; I may even stay PC/CR and make the retro-Pennsy equipment I have now become the special run stuff.
Modeling the Rio Grande Southern First District circa 1938-1946 in HOn3.
Welcome to the dark side Dave!
Penn central RULES!
Carl T.
Hi, Dave!
The next thing you need is a figure painted up to represent Stuart Saunders. Tree, noose and angry stockholders optional.
Chuck (modeling Central Japan in September, 1964)
Watch that slide into CR timeframe, you may have to remodel everything! That being said, Walthers used to make a decal set that was a for PC boxcar that had been relettered for CR. It's a rusty car with the PC noodle and reporting marks painted out in jade green
George In Midcoast Maine, 'bout halfway up the Rockland branch
From the far, far reaches of the wild, wild west I am: rtpoteet
GARRY
HEARTLAND DIVISION, CB&Q RR
EVERYWHERE LOST; WE HUSTLE OUR CABOOSE FOR YOU
Dave, that's just WRONG.
On so many levels.
Andre
Oh yeah? Just wait until I do the CR - PC black loco paint-out!
I can't wait until I get a chance to do one of these babies:
Dave Vollmer wrote: Oh yeah? Just wait until I do the CR - PC black loco paint-out!I can't wait until I get a chance to do one of these babies:
Brethren and Sistern. I say Brethren and Sistern. Let us pray for our poor benighted brother Dave who has lost his way and now wanders in the wilderness of Penn Central despair. Only with constant prayer can our brother be returned from the outer darkness to the paths of righteousness that he may walk in the light. Can I get an "Amen"?
Amen to that andre!
Dave, here's what you giotta do - go outside, find some coal, light said coal, breathe deep... and come back to the light side
-Dan
Builder of Bowser steam! Railimages Site
Used to trainwatch at Waterloo, IN when it was NYC then the merger. Shot some film there too.
There was a branch that ran from Ft Wayne to Waterloo that ended or crossed sometime. GR&I that is. A friend walked it all the way from Ft Wayne and we met him up at Waterloo and took him home. Active line, so the action was hot, double track, trains taking the crossovers to do a pass or whatever. Then The passenger train would come and stop. Time went by and the passengers didnt stop. The depot was closed and moved, I guess maybe as a historical spot or museum, dunno. Whatatyme.
We'd watch the signals and guess what the action might be, a train might come screamin thru or hit the crossover, or the local came by and did a little work, the engine sometimes there idling away.
Then we go and hit Pops, a little Ice Cream spot run by this fella, just some little trailer sized place in the middle of the sidewalk, and get cones or Ice cream or floats.
Very quaint little thing.
Dave, beware of the slippery slope ---
My original layout concept was an early Conrail theme, with lots of PC power and paint outs, Amtrak phase 2, and a spin-off shortline with a live interchange. When I see Ed's growing collection of paint outs, I sometimes pine for those days. I cut my railfanning teeth back in the late 70's with trips to Enola and the Middle Division. Those big stone arches, the lousy track, Trailvans with six geeps up front...
(They did that to make sure that at least 3 of them were still working by the end of the trip...)
Between the historic landscape built by the Pennsy (and the other CR predecessors of course...) the corporate intrigue that created and ultimately brought down the PC, and the determination that Conrail and its people had to bring it all out of the ashes, and literally changed the way the nation's railroads did business... makes for some fascinating stuff.
We're with you 100%, Dave!Lee
Route of the Alpha Jets www.wmrywesternlines.net
I dunno I could ever do the PC, after the greatness for what the NYC and Pennsy were, it feels like the doldrums and that the 2 could even think about merging, the great competitors. When that happened just about everybody was WHUT?!?!?!
But maybe its like modeling a beat up backwoods logging line, there gets to be a certain frugalness about it, and yes your right, track maintenance wasn't always best, rockin and rollin cars, I got film to prove it. Consider modeling that..err..hehehe (/me carves out a few dips into the roadbed)
!960's after thru the 70's is kinda like also the shock of no more steam either on the railroads. I think the railroad world was going thru an adjustment. Its also the time of favorite lines abandoning or edging on abandonment like the North Shore and the C&O letting the South Shore cars rust out on thinking they will abandon the electric.
Lots of Doldrums and bailouts and recovery (or losses)
Folks have strong feelings about the PC, and they're rarely good.
I'm really leaning toward doing very early Conrail which was still heavy w/ PC stuff.
The ideal train would be a blue CR diesel with a black PC/CR paint-out behind with maybe a RDG paint-out for a third, with a mix of cars from the Northeast bankrupts, and a CR cabin.
I love the Pennsy and am not giving up a single piece of my PRR roster. Allowing a second era (namely the mid- to late-70s) gives me the chance to model what I remember as a young boy (I was born too late for Pennsy), as well as to strike a balance with my 5-year-old, who loves Conrail and Amtrak. Of course, he'd rather run P42s and Superliners and doesn't quite realize that the Conrail diesels he sees around here are owned by CSX and will be repainted in due time, but...
The attraction to model what one remembers as a child is a very strong one. If only I'd been more aware of the GG1s and all of the rainbow Conrail paint-outs I took for granted when I was so young... All gone now, even Conrail.
I did Conrail railfanning from Penn State as a college student... ...so the day they moved a Conrail (ex-PC ex-PRR) GP30 into the Railroad Museum of PA (along with the Silverliner cars I rode with my mother from Lancaster to Philadelphia), I began to realize how much had changed.
Speaking of PC and Lancaster... Anyone remember the pair of PC baggage cars that sat next to the head house at Lancaster station well into the 90s? They finally came out to Strasburg for restoration. It'll be interesting to see if they come back PC or NYC.
Dave - Here is an N scale Kato SD40 that I did about 5 years ago.
Dave,
My interests are Milwaukee Road in the late 50'. My son was interested in 'Amtrak' and those flashing FRED's on the back of freight trains. I guess it has a lot to do with what you think you remember when you were a kid!
Jim
Modeling BNSF and Milwaukee Road in SW Wisconsin
I guess I'm an outlier on that "model what you grew up with" trend. If that was the case, I'd be modelling the '90s... modern diesels are just too ugly for my tastes (though I can live with some of the 1st generation ones... barely )
There's a member on the Atlas forum who models the PC, his signature contains an interesting slogan that sums it all up:
"Penn Central - no way to run a railroad, but fun to model!"
-Ken in Maryland (B&O modeler, former CSX modeler)
cf-7 wrote: Dave - Here is an N scale Kato SD40 that I did about 5 years ago.
NeO6874 wrote: I guess I'm an outlier on that "model what you grew up with" trend. If that was the case, I'd be modelling the '90s... modern diesels are just too ugly for my tastes (though I can live with some of the 1st generation ones... barely )
I'm in the same boat right now, modeling 1956. I do love steam. And the 50s were really the last great decade of the PRR... The long slide had already begun, but outwardly it still appeared healthy.
But other than seeing the cold carcasses of the PRR great steam fleet at the RR Museum of PA (and riding behind PRR 1223 and 7002 when they still ran on the Strasburg), PRR steam was a distant dream to me. One I wish were memory, but a dream only.
My formative years were the painful re-birth of Northeastern railroading from the ashes of bankrupcy. That rebirth was not without death; many thousands of miles of track were abandoned to make Conrail profitable.
Here's mine. I love it.
Ah, yes, the Nixon-Carter years... those were good times.
Just remember to make your rails sag at the joints, toss litter everywhere, and cover everything with a healthy layer of Woodland Scenics Bag O' Grime.
http://www.railpictures.net/viewphoto.php?id=193019&nseq=75
I grew up during the PC era as well. I remember filthy GG1's hauling freight. Kind of sad, but interesting too.
Nelson
Ex-Southern 385 Being Hoisted
SecretWeapon, what is the deal with that Passenger Platform height in that second image you posted? It looks higher than the passengers?
Actually I think the later Penn Central years might well be worth modeling - say 1973/1974. Consider that the Penn Central (and CNJ, and Reading et al - maybe not Erie Lackawanna, although Hurricane Agnes certainly mucked them up) was operating like a shoe-string operation - yet it owned a significant amount of the US rail freight car fleet, and generated quite a bit of traffic. During those years (when nobody was quite sure of the end-game), it still carried a lot of freight - deregulation had not occured, there were still lots of factories and facilities in the North East (although the rust belt concept was beginning to get notices), the coming failure of the (vertically integrated) US steel industry was probably not on everyone's radar screen...plenty of local freight and old time railroading, mixed with the new forms of freight cars that started to emerged during the 1960s - Centerflow hoppers, outside Post Boxcars (sans roofwalks), pneumatic Covered hoppers, 70t mech reefers, 100ton hoppers, steel coil cars, frameless tankcars, TOFC/COFC and so on - (plus experimental 'few offs' like Pregnant Whale tank cars or NYC Clamshell coil cars), and best of all these relatively new cars could be heavily weathered (unless owned by BN, or Santa Fe, or UP, or some of the railroads of the period who still cared). Throw in beat looking 1st generation F-Units and GP9s, and somewhat used looking 2nd Gens like GP38s and SD40s, and have a blast (and take those steam engines and 'stuff and mount' them in big town parks along your layout - make sure you model kids climbing over them during the day, and teens doing some dubes in the cab at night).Best of all, you get to use all the cool looking HO scale vehicles from the late 1960s and early 70s that manfacturer's are turning out.
jrbernier wrote:Dave, My interests are Milwaukee Road in the late 50'. My son was interested in 'Amtrak' and those flashing FRED's on the back of freight trains. I guess it has a lot to do with what you think you remember when you were a kid!Jim
That's how I think, I guess. I remember when the local stuff I saw was SD38s and SD40T-2s, with the daily local to the steel mill in town was behind a pair of SD9s and the pre-winter rush to Lake Erie brought a few ancient F units out of hiding. Nothing had a wide cab either. Any future layout I build will have a healthy core of SD40-2s.
Yep, it's hard to stick to one era. Personally, I'm looking to go the other way. Have a 50's Ma&Pa and a 20's version of rolling stock.
Enjoy
Paul
REPENT! REPENT!! FOR THE PENSY RETURNETH AT AN HOUR WHICH YOU DO NOT KNOW!!! (i.e. late as usual:)
I like the PRR so much I had to change history, I merged it with the Virginian, and The V&AL was born. I had some PC equipment, but it had to go, no PC in my version of history. PRR equipment still runs as heritage units:
Go for it Dave. I model the NYC, mostly in the 50s. I have several videos which show th PC on the pointy end - on the rails in the Midwest.
It was a busy vital link for many businesses and towns. Before the actual end of passenger service they ran dozens of passenger trains. Some are fascinating, with PRR, NYC and PC E units on the point. Sometimes all three!
I too have thought about changing eras to the PC. It is tempting, they ran virtually every type diesel of locomotive available at the time. So virtually anything in my roster would still be usable. And paint-outs/patch jobs would be fun and easy to do. We'll see.
I wish you luck.
Remember its your railroad
Allan
Track to the BRVRR Website: http://www.brvrr.com/