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My husband and I have been watching quite a few videos lately of trains in our era of interest, the 40s and 50s. Last night we got 'stuck' at a RR crossing, first car in the line. Of course we took the opporunity to enjoy some train watching, and comparing the consist of today to the consists of yesteryear. Our local branchline RR, The P &W, was operating a train pulled by 4 older GPs, probably GP35s...In some respects, these are almost museum items, [ but we could argue that the nearby Tillamook Bay GP9s are closer to that mark ]. They were followed by somewhere between 80 and 90 cars. We noted that there was only one reefer car in the consist, and only 3 boxcars. The remainder were tank cars, covered hoppers, and bulkhead flats designed for bulk lumber products. It was interesting to note that in the 40s, the vintage films and photos from books reveal the vast majority of the general purpose cars were boxcars, that carried almost all the goods of America, both locally and over distance. Today, trucks handle most regional goods shipping, and containers carry the goods over long distances, often intermodally.with ship, train and trucking involved. Taking a trip across town to the mainline RR we see miles and miles of containers passing through.  Our local branchline serves medium sized manufacturing and wood products processing in the Willamette Valley of Oregon on tracks once owned by the fallen flag, Southern Pacific. Reflecting the changing times, and the industries served, the train consisted moslty of huge commodity shipments inbound and outbound. It seems the day of the basic boxcar carrying small goods has long passed into a minority position.  No matter where we railfan, we hardly ever see a gondola car in revenue service, also once a common sight, and I havent seen a stock car in anything but a museum. Aside from the demise of steam in favor of internal combustion/electric who would have guessed 50 years ago how the face of railroading was to change,  Today we have virtually no passenger service, and completely new classes of freight cars, unimagined in the 1940s. The idea of carrying a trailer van on a flatcar, a trailer usually pulled by a truck, was new, and the modern container, let along the unit trains to carry them, was yet to be conceived.   in the 40s, new automobiles were carried in boxcars with interior fittings to elevate one car above another,... later they were carried on open multi deck flatcars, and today on nearly enclosed multideck cars, in a way reflecting the protective enclosure of the 40s boxcar, but with easier loading and higher capacity, ...again a car that was not yet imagined of in the 40s.  In building a model railroad, one has to look beyond the aesthetics of the equipment and the period in general, and look at how rail traffic is generated, switched and sorted, and sent along the main.  The small town with a dozen sidings and a small yard is largely history...just the kind of trackage that lends itself to modeling and operation....GONE..and almost forgotten. Today, the big tonnage is containers and the associated huge port terminals, or huge shipments of liquids, powders and granulated solids mostly associated with large industry and commodity agricultural goods like grains and corn syrup. Todays industries and points of origin/destination are 'hard' to reperesent with a small building at a short siding on a model RR .  I like watching and ocassionally even riding  [Amtrak] the modern trains, but for modeling and operation, give me the railroads of my childhood, or the narrow gauge lines of an even earlier era.  Of course, for those who like to run trains through the scenery and not bother with much operating/switching, ANY era, including the present, is easy and with modern equipment, quite colorful. Just an observation to ponder...... Cheers! Jennifer. By the way, I'm re registered here after an absense of about 16 months....Mike and I are still 2 rail  O scalers, but now with a much larger model roster, and still no completed trackage to run 'em on.
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