You're right, Randy. Seems like right after the war "merger fever" was taking place. Well, the war left a lot of railroads broke and equipment worn out.
I think Robert R. Young was pushing for a C&O-NYC merger. This was the time when railroad executives started moving from railroad to railroad (Perlman, Barriger come to mind) and the railroads more and more were led by Harvard Business School grads rather than old-line railroaders that came up through the ranks.
Ed
"One difference between pessimists and optimists is that while pessimists are more often right, optimists have far more fun."
The Ambroid kits made for some nice cars, but they were not quicky kits by any stretch. Lots of work involved in making one. The "1 in 5000" thing got streteched a bit - some kits there were less than 5000 and others had way more than 5000. As is typical, the ones that didn't sell 5000 back then are probably the ones people today would want. Just guessing, I'm not looking at any sort of chart that shows the model and production numbers, that info is likely out there though.
--Randy
Modeling the Reading Railroad in the 1950's
Visit my web site at www.readingeastpenn.com for construction updates, DCC Info, and more.
Cheers, the Bear.
This one has more info: http://www.trainweb.org/ambroidkits/trains/woodkits/Ambroid_5-Cars.htm
ANd since the one shown on the site you linked was the Matheison Dry Ice reefer, I ended up searching that and came up with the completely off topic site with some protoype info of the replacement - in the mid 30's they stopped using generic reefers and built specialty cars for hauling dry ice. Which can be seen here: http://www.richyodermodels.com/mathieson_history.htm What I can't imagine is doing like the 4th picture down, being INSIDE one of those cars loading and unloading it - being that dry ice is carbon dioxide and it surely would be sublimating into gas inside there, cutting the oxygen by a lot, those vents along the top edge or not.