Building a WWII ATSF fleet III-Automobile Cars

Santa Fe had a large fleet of 4395 AAR class XA cars in January 1945 plus 298 Fe-24 class cars equipped for passenger service.  About 40% or 1902 cars were 40 footers the rest, large 50 foot cars.  126 forty foot and 356 of the fifty foot cars had operable end doors as listed in the ORER.  I state it that way as a number of cars retained their end doors that had been sealed at some point in their careers.  The numbers here are derived from the Santa Fe ORER listings in the Jan 1945 ORER.  I previously posted a link to my Excel spread sheet transcription in my first post in this series.  I have adopted Tony Thompson’s methodology of using a defined fraction of the ORER fleet as a representative sample for my modeled fleet.  The base number I have chosen is one modeled car for every 250 in the ORER.  I figure I will need about 1200 cars overall and that I want to have 1/3 home road cars and that gives me a good sample.  That gives me a target of eight forty foot and nine fifty footers plus a passenger Fe-24.  OK, that’s the starting point for the analysis, but the XA and BX cars were not truly free rolling like the rest of the box car fleet, much being in captive service or limited express service. 

I’ll tackle the express service first.  Like Lays potato chips, one green and gold Fe-24 is not enough.  I have no evidence of express cars on the Golden Gates, but they were used on the Scout and Grand Canyon.  Not every train had them, but a car would not show up day after day, different cars are needed.  So, at least two passenger lettered Fe-24s. 

Extended height cars.  Santa Fe rebuilt a number of cars with higher roofs during the war and assigned them to carry aircraft parts.  Richard Hendrickson describes many of those assignments in his excellent book on Furniture and Automobile Cars, in stock on the ATSF Railway Historical and Modeling Society web site at http://www.atsfrr.org/store/bookFrt.htm.  Richard states that 40 of the Fe-8s were used to load A-20 fuselages in Detroit and carry them to Douglas Aircraft in El Segundo.  So here is an example of where you are modeling makes a difference in what you see.  Modeling the El Segundo branch, you need a bunch to spot at your aircraft plant.  A bit further south on the Surf Line, you need other aircraft parts cars for the parts to and from the San Diego plants, but not the El Segundo assigned Fe-8s.  If you model Cajon, you need more than the system wide fraction, as they would be frequent travelers to the LA basin but you need the San Diego assigned cars too.  Raton, maybe not, but maybe some.  Flint Hills and the Belen cut off, yes, but maybe not as many as Cajon as some of the traffic might be on Raton.  If you model the Alma or Howard branches, you might see one on a passing main line train.  Tehachapi and the Valley Division to Stockton, you would see the cars moving assemblies between SoCal and Washington state  And if you are west of Stockton with no aircraft plants or industries making large aircraft parts, you don’t need any as they were in dedicated service elsewhere.  So for my line that models the west end of the third district, I don’t have to worry about finding those cool Westerfield kits of the extended height cars.  A bit of a disappointment for this pilot, but hey, one of the advantages of modeling your fleet on the prototype is figuring out what NOT to buy.  And if you are like me, you already made a lot of this is cool purchases over the years. 

Regular Auto cars.  I think I may need more than the proportional fleet share as I am modeling the Richmond Ford plant and Chevrolet had a large truck plant in Hayward on the SP.  A large number of XAP cars would have been in dedicated parts service carrying jeep engines, seats, bodies and other parts from their eastern suppliers to the plants.  And like the aircraft parts cars, they would be turned immediately back to the suppliers for the next load to keep the production lines humming.  A great two cycle waybill, but multiple cars are needed to account for the travel time to the source.  Of course, Santa Fe wasn’t the only road in the pool, but the foreign cars are the subject of another post.  And the XARs would have delivered military vehicles to the San Francisco Port of Embarkation in Oakland for shipment overseas and moved assembled trucks from Hayward and Jeeps from Richmond East.  With this heavy vehicle traffic, I am thinking that I may want to double the proportion of  non-aircraft loading double door cars while zeroing those taller cars.  For sake of simplicity, I will exclude all cars over 10’6 inside height which is a total of 180 Fe-8, 13 and 15. 

The Table below lays out the number of cars in each class, models needed and on hand.

Class	ORER	Need	Have
Fe-K*	4	0
Fe-L*	38	0
Fe-M*	2	0
Fe-N*	68	1
Fe-O*	17	0
Fe-P	774	6	1
Fe-05	253	2
Fe-06	99	1	1
Fe-07	154	1	1
Fe-08	2	0	1
Fe-09	55	0	1
Fe-10	50	0	1
Fe-11	98	1
Fe-12	100	1
Fe-13	233	2
Fe-14	100	1
Fe-15	223	2
Fe-16	100	1
Fe-18	50	0
Fe-19	399	3
Fe-20	200	2
Fe-21*	47	0
Fe-22*	200	2
Fe-23	214	2
Fe-24	199	2	2
Fe-25	494	4
* End Doors	4173	34
Pass Fe-24	298	2-4

I didn’t count any of the old Athearn Blue Box cars in my have column.  I have a bunch, and as stand ins for the missing classes they will serve, but I do intend to replace them.  Of the quality cars and kits I do have, only three are in excess of needs and at least one can be used to represent a combined Fe-9/10 grouping.  More on modeling this group of cars in future posts.

JOHN BARRY

Cameron Park, CA

30 April 2014