Building a WWII ATSF Fleet VII Freight Car Fleet, the USRA 40’ Double Sheathed Box Car – Gilbert-Nelson results from the Jan 45 ORER

I’ve been working with the January 1945 Official Railway Equipment Register to come up with realistic numbers of representative freight cars for my California based railroad during the latter part of World War II.  I’ve been converting the image files on the Westerfield CD to a PDF and have been building an index/table of contents.  I am going a step further though, and compiling a listing of the car types operated by each railroad and private operator.  I finished the RR portion and came up with a total of 1,968,421 US railroad owned cars, excluding passenger, MOW and cabooses.  Canadian and Mexican roads are included in this total. 

I have yet to compile the data on the private car owners, which includes the refrigerators of PFE, FGE, etc.  Nor does it include the box cars of the private lines.  But it does give a basis for comparison of the box car fleets of my modeled era. 

Having read Tony Thompson and Charles Hostetler’s blogs and their posts on the Gilbert-Nelson freight car distribution, I wanted to see if I could figure out how many and which roads’ USRA Double Sheathed cars were active at the end of 1944.  My first thought was to start with the original owners, and somewhere on my hard drive I have photos of the article published in one of the historical journals that listed the proposed and actual USRA production and distribution.  I really need to get better organized, as I have not yet combined them into a usable PDF and I didn’t remember some of my other references.  Well, Google is my friend, (and yours too), and a search for “USRA double sheathed boxcar” led me to a page on Eric Hansmann’s blog, http://designbuildop.hansmanns.org/a-guide-to-1920s-era-ho-scale-plastic-freight-cars/, that reminded me of the Railway Prototype Cyclopedia on my reference book shelf.

I don’t have all of them, as I came late to the game, but they are fantastic goldmines of data.  Using the table provided on pages 50 and 51 of Volume 16, I searched through my index to locate the owner’s Jan 45 entries in the ORER.  With that info in hand, I constructed the following table of surviving cars for my era:

USRA Double Sheathed Cars
Railroad	Series			Qty	Notes
ACL	43735	-	44234	493	Class 0-15 Ventilator
B&M	70000	-	70499	486
CB&Q	120500	-	120999	479
CRI&P	155000	-	157499	1669
CStPM&O	36100	-	37098	84	Even Nos Only
DL&W	44000	-	44799	431
DSS&A	16000	-	16049	49	Ex PM
GN	23494	-	24993	1450
GTW	465000	-	456249	185
KCS	15500	-	15599	94
M&StL	22000	-	22598	292	Even Nos Only
M&StL	25000	-	25898	393	Even Nos Only
M&StL	51000	-	51398	197	Even Nos Only
M&StL			Total	882
MP	45001	-	45250	230
NWP	1900	-	1999	100
CCC&StL	56784	-	56974	2	NYC Lot 402-B
NYC	234700	-	234945	242	Lot 386-B
NYC	278000	-	278999	667	Lots 394-B and 404-B
NYC	290000	-	290999	964	Lots 382-B, 395-B and 402-B
NYC			Total	1875
PM	80000	-	80499	1	XAB Double Door Auto Car
PM	80500	-	81999	4
PM			Total	5
SL-SF	127000	-	130499	1035	57 cars differ in dimensions, shares series with 2450+ steel rebuilds
SP&S	10000	-	10299	293
TH&B	4500	-	4799	297	(Canadian)
WAB	78200	-	80999	2635
				12772	Total Active Jan 45 ORER
				12279	Total USRA XM Jan 45 ORER
				12475	US owned USRA cars

Several interesting points about this data:  The total number of USRA cars is approximately equal to the number of Ventilator or 50’ plain box cars in 1945, 12772 USRA, 12729 Ventilator, 13678 50’ plain box.  So if Nelson-Gilbert holds true, any late WWII modeler should have approximately equal numbers of 40’ USRA DS, 50’ single door box, and ventilator cars on the layout.  Right now, I have two 50’ SD box and no Vents.  I plan for a couple more home road 50’rs to fill in my missing Santa Fe classes, but didn’t have plans for any Vents.  I may have to invest in a few of the Westerfield vent kits.  The other thing that this reminded me of, is that the nice Bx-2 I picked up at an estate sale either needs to go to a new home, get re-lettered for one of the above owners, or kept as a known anachronism.  I could explain it as the roving car inspector found it hidden behind the shop on the XYZ RR in east Timbuktu. . .