Building a WWII ATSF Fleet VI – Gilbert-Nelson results from the Jan 45 ORER

I have not written much of late and last touched this topic in June 2014 before I moved to DC.  You can see my five prior posts on the topic of building a representative WWII fleet at:

http://northbaylines.blogspot.com/2014/06/building-wwii-atsf-fleet-vlocomotive.html

http://northbaylines.blogspot.com/2014/05/building-wwii-santa-fe-fleet-iv.html

http://northbaylines.blogspot.com/2014/05/building-wwii-atsf-fleet-iii-automobile.html

http://northbaylines.blogspot.com/2014/04/building-wwii-atsf-fleet-iiboat-flats.html

and I first wrote on this topic with an explanation of how I was setting the home road portion at:

http://northbaylines.blogspot.com/2014/04/building-wwii-atsf-fleet.html

A couple years back I obtained the CD copy of the Jan 45 edition of the ORER from Westerfield to supplement the Apr 43 and Oct 45 hard copies that I picked up in the 80’s.  The electronic edition has become my stick in the sand for what ran on US rails on my modeling era, right at the end of 1944.  The Apr 43 issue didn’t cover the war built cars and the Oct 45 included stuff that didn’t show up till after VJ day.  Having both hard copy editions made it possible for me to check a lot (and I do mean A LOT!) of things, but left me guessing and having to interpolate just a little too much.  I am an engineer, you know, and good data is golden!   

The CD consists of TIFF image scans of the individual pages, with the owner name as part of the file name.  This works well if you are working from you CD drive on a desk top computer, but I had grown used to the layout of the hard copies.  So I made a PDF shortly after I acquired it and ended up with a whopper of a single file, but one that I could use a lot easier on the laptop, Kindle and a portable drive for other computers.  I set it up to put the RRs in the front and the Private Owners in the back like the originals, but, as I discovered, the alphabetical scan names are not how the ORER is arranged.  It is somewhat easy to remember that ATSF is a lot closer to the front alphabetically than the Wyandotte.  It worked, but was clumsy.  I use the “Index of Railroads and Private Car Owners” in the hard copies to navigate the books, but there are three problems with using that method with the CD.  First, almost none of the scans includes the original page number, probably a limitation of the size of the scanner bed.  Second, the file names of the pages are keyed to the RR, not the original page, and some of the smaller roads that took up less than a page have separate scans to make the XYZ easier to find from your Windows file directory.  Third, the disk is not a complete ORER.  All of the roads that had cars are covered, at least I think they are as it is very comprehensive. But the front matter and the Editorial section at the end didn’t make the disk.  I grant that much of that info is ho-hum to most modelers, but some of it is useful to operators, like the recapitulation of box, auto and flat cars or the car service rules.  Also the List of Reporting Marks Assigned changed fairly often, so it would have been nice to have.  But I made due. 

After copying the ATSF data into an Excel spread sheet and expanding the entries to account for the ATSF classes by using the excellent ATSFRRH&MS reference books, I plodded along guessing what page Erie and Pennsy started on.  By the way, you Pennsy guys have it easy with the ORER as it lists your classes along with the number series.  Oh, I guess it makes it easier for us non-Pennsy guys to get it right too.  Or not, I bought a Sunshine X26C in December 2014 that if I’d checked a little closer, would have discovered it was built AFTER my era before I bid.  Oh well . . . Back to the matter at hand.  I decided an index was a good idea for my PDF conglomeration.  Before I left California in the summer of 2014, I obtained a copy of the index pages from the California State Railroad Museum (CSRM) Library.  I wish I’d thought to grab the List of Reporting Marks at the same time as it would have been more valuable to me, another lesson learned.  I had used the capabilities of my full copy of Adobe Acrobat to put footers on each page that include the page number.  Progress!  Now I had a reasonable starting point.  I started out with a simple Table of Contents in Excel showing the start and stop page, reporting mark, road name and total car count.  After a couple sessions, it became clear that I had an opportunity to expand the usefulness of this project if I included just a little more data.  Requirements creep had set in, but in a good way.  I resisted the urge to digitize ALL of the individual line entries as I had for the ATSF.  That would still have me doing a very long data entry task for marginal gain.  Being able to sort on cubic capacity or inside height can tell you a lot about similar cars on different lines, but. . . I’d rather know how many short box cars I need for my planned 600 car fleet.  I discovered a relatively fast way to do that.  I noticed in my first couple data entry sessions that many of the larger entries had recaps of the owner’s fleet broken down by car length for box and auto cars.  I changed my TOC to become more of a database of car types by road with what page I could find the entry on.  Killing two birds with one stone, I went back and added the info to my previous entries to complete the data set.  It took a bit longer, but I think the effort was worth while. 

I finished the data entry phase last month and had a grand total of 2,236,560 freight cars listed in the Jan 45 ORER give or take a couple hundred.  I tried to QC my entries and they are pretty good, but I know I had one that the recap and the page totals differed and I couldn’t figure out the correct number from the scanned images and didn’t want to manually add each line entry for 10,000 cars.  A couple percent on that one entry is way below the threshold of reasonable.  Nearly all of the other entries did up, most exactly, but a few were within 2-10 cars.  Again, I can live with that out of 2.2 Million.  Gee, that quote is three orders of magnitude higher than the worst known error.  There is one thing not accounted for and you will see an example of it in my selected cars:  not all private owners registered in every ORER edition.  The List of Reporting Marks has a dingbat that indicates which ones opted out of that edition.  TOCX, True’s Oil Company, wasn’t in the Private Owner listings on the CD.  It is in both of my hard copies that bracket the CD date, so I am confident that TOCX 10 was really plying the rails in Dec 44 despite it not having an entry in the Jan 45 edition.  The number of missing cars is likely to be small compared to the total, so I am not too worried about that as it comes to choosing the fleet.

So how does the Jan 45 fleet break down?  Of the 2.2 M cars, 2.05 M were in the US,

REPORT MARKS		BX	BH	BR	XM3	XM4	XM5	XA3	XA4	XA5	XA7
874	US TOTAL	1674	29	3703	57917	543007	13679	1642	75517	35951	1
944	ORER TOTAL	1674	29	4195	119727	602318	13679	1643	79768	35965	1
REPORT MARKS		V	S	G	F	H	T	R	L	B	LOG
874	US TOTAL	12729	57416	342920	58825	508100	154137	140607	12660	14958	14491
944	ORER TOTAL	12729	64789	357241	70393	516685	162484	146961	12671	18539	15069
REPORT MARKS		Tot Box + Auto	XM	XA	X&V
874	US TOTAL	729388	614603	113111	742117
944	ORER TOTAL	854775	735724	117377	867504
REPORT MARKS		CARS		-H,LOG
874	US TOTAL	2049963		1529203
944	ORER TOTAL	2236560		1707204

The prototype fleet is humongous and the distribution of short box and auto cars is significant, more so than the 50 footers that Life Like/Walthers has over tempted me and my modeling budget.  Statistically non-existent was the 70 foot auto car, 1 in 2.23 million.  But if your city needed a LaFrance Ladder Truck, you were going to see that car, so it wasn’t as rare as the numbers make it out, but it was a special delivery like the Naval Rifles on the PRR or MILW gun flats.  ATSF interchanged traffic by barge directly to Mare Island, having handled 3,345 carloads via barge under contract with Crowley Launch & Tugboat Company between July 1940 and March 1944 (Baldwin 44-page 30).  That might not have been the route for the big gun, but the Port Chicago interchange with the SP could have gotten it there without an en-route sailing.  But those will be special movements, not common every ops session.  What will be common during ops sessions is steel, lots of it for the shipyards; petroleum products to and from the refineries; chemicals for Dow and the industries on the SP; merchandise cars, scads of them; auto parts for the war plants at Ford in Richmond and Chevy in Hayward via the SP in Oakland; not to mention boatloads of box cars of supply for the San Francisco Port of Embarkation and lots of vehicles in XAs or on flats & gons.  I figure that I will need an overage of the free running percentage for XAs and flats to account for the war traffic.  Maybe all those 50’ XAs are OK after all? 

So how have I set up my target fleet?  I started with the last numbers listed above and subtracted my home road cars from the totals without the hoppers or log cars.  I then divided my proposed fleet size into home road and foreign portions.  In my case, I used 1/3 and 2/3 based on the CSRM equipment survey document mentioned in the fourth post of this series and photos showing about that proportion in 1943.  I had previously set my Santa Fe cars modeled to 1/250 for all but XAs and FMs which are at 1/125 to account for the specialties needed above.  This gives me a slightly larger than 33% home road fleet, but with adjustments for cars less needed like reefers and stock cars, its still a 60/40 split even though the total has crept up a bit.

Mark	TOT	Name	XM3	XM4	XM5	XA3	XA4	XA5	XA7	V	S	G	F	H	T	R	L	B
	685	GRAND TOTAL	29	215	10	1	35	44	1	4	24	136	43	4	68	59	2	9
	100%	INCL For @ 20%	4%	31%	1%	0%	5%	6%	0%	1%	4%	20%	6%	1%	10%	9%	0%	1%
39%	264	ATSF NBL CARS	10	73	6		15	22			16	45	22	4	14	30	2	5
60%	411	NON-ATSF US NBL	16	139	4	1	20	22	1	4	8	90	20		54	28	0	4
600 F FLT
1/3 HOME	398	G-N NON-ATSF US	15	142	3	0	20	9	0	4	14	91	15		42	35	3	4
ATSF	206	G-N ATSF US	7	67	4	0	5	6	0	0	21	31	7	7	9	37	0	3

So how does that break out with the other railroads?  Even without the hoppers, Pennsy and NYC are the largest component.  Fewer reefers are used than the home road percentage of SFRD cars because other than Middle River, produce and fruit weren’t big originating commodities although produce arrived at Bay area canning plants from the central valley and LCL, magazines and other clean cargo cut down on empty miles for reefers returning to the West Coast. 

Mark	TOTAL	XM3	XM4	XM5	XA3	XA4	XA5	XA7	V	S	G	F	H	T	R	L	B
PRR	44		18			2	2	1		1	19	1
NYC	30	1	15	1		1	1				10	1
B&O	18		10			1	1				5	1
SP	16		7			1	1			1	2	2		1		0	1
UP	16		6	1		1	1			2	2	1		1			1
CB&Q	14	1	5			1	1			1	4	1
MILW	14		7			1	1			1	3	1
GATX	13													11	2
CNW	13		7			1	1			1	2	1
GN	12		6	1			1			1	1	1		1
IC	12		4	1		1	1				4	1
SR	12	4	3			1					3	1
L&N	11	2	2		1				1		4	1
MP	11	1	5			1	1				2	1
UTLX	11													11
RI	10		5			1	1				2	1
PFE	10														10
NP	9		5				1				1	1					1
ACL	7		1			2	1		1		1	1
C&O	6	1	2			1					2
N&W	6		2			1	1				2
ERIE	5	1	2				1				1
SBD	5		2						1		1	1
SLSF	5		3								1	1
WAB	5		2			2					1
FGEX	4														4
DRG&W	4		1				1				2
MDT	3														3
CG	3		1				1		1
DL&W	3	1	1								1
EJ&E	3										2	1
GTW	3	1				1	1
NKP	3		2								1
SHPX	3													3
SOO	3		2				1
WLE	3		1								2
ART	3														3
BM	2		1								1
CNJ	2		1								1
D&H	2	1									1
LV	2		1								1
NATX	2													2
NH	2	1	1
SDRX	2													2
T&P	2		1				1
WFEX	2														2
URTX	2														2
ARLX	1														1
NRC	1														1
A	1		1
AOX	1													1
BMX	1													1
C&EI	1										1
CGW	1		1
CIL	1										1
CONX	1													1
COSX	1													1
CSOX	1													1
DOWX	1													1
DUPX	1													1
EBAX	1													1
GM&O	1		1
GRCX	1													1
HHCX	1													1
LUX	1													1
M&StL	1		1
MEC	1		1
MKT	1		1
MPCX	1													1
MPLX	1													1
NC&StL	1	1
PSPX	1													1
SCCX	1													1
SLSF	1																1
SUNX	1													1
TOCX	1													1
UCR	1										1
UOCX	1													1
URR	1										1
USOX	1													1
USQX	1													1
VGN	1										1
WEOX	1													1
WM	1		1
WRNX	1													1
CPCX	0
DPX	0
DRX	0
GCX	0
ISTX	0
KTX	0
OZKX	0
PTLX	0
SCOX	0
US SUB TOTAL	411
CN	4	1	2	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0
CP	4	2	1	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0
N de M	1	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0
For Sub	9	3	3	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	1	1	0	0	0	0	0

I need to validate the tank car numbers to account for Dow’s home point at their Pittsburg plant and cross check the UTLX proportion given the 50% share of the documented Port Chicago interchange traffic.  The Ethyl Corp’s EBAX cars also need to be represented on a frequent basis to carry antiknock compound to the refineries on the Carquinez strait making AVGAS for the war effort.  I can’t duplicate the image of a string of Phillips 66 tanks with a singleton either.  But those are for further research and future blog posts.

John Barry

Arlington VA