Eric
Hansmann has posted another installment of prototype information for Accurail’s
forthcoming 36 foot box car kits on his Design, Build, Op blog. (http://designbuildop.hansmanns.org/accurail-prototype-data/)
Ray Breyer has done a great job again with a
summary of prototypes for the 1400 series straight sill version with metal
ends. Ray gives some information as to
how many cars of a given prototype survived at certain dates. That is very helpful for determining how many
of a given road name existed at that point in time. But it doesn’t tell you about the rest of the
fleet and how likely it would be to see any short box cars at that point. My recent work on the January 1945 Official
Railway Equipment Register (you can read about it here: http://northbaylines.blogspot.com/2016/03/building-wwii-atsf-fleet-vi-gilbert.html)
gives a ready reference to how common the less than 40 foot car was.
Source:
Jan 45 ORER
US XM
less than 40': 57,917
NA XM
less than 40': 119,727
Total
US cars all types: 2,049,963 2.8%
Total
North America: 2,236,560 5.4%
Total
US Box, Auto & Vent: 742,117 7.8%
Total
NA Box, Auto & Vent: 867,504 13.8%
Total
US Box & Auto: 729,388
7.9%
Total
US Box & Auto: 845,775
14.0%
Total
US Box: 614,603
9.4%
Total
NA Box: 735,724
16.3%
The US fleet at the beginning of the last year of WWII was
nearly 10% of the XM box cars registered in the ORER.
The number of short auto cars was much lower, 1642 of 113,11
US auto cars, or 1.5%.
The total short XM and XA percentage was 8.2% of the US and
14.2% of the North American the Box and Auto fleet. The percentage of short house cars should be
larger also, but I don’t have a summary of ventilator car lengths, only the VA
totals. A significant portion was less
than 40 feet though.
The pending K brake interchange ban, availability of steel
for post war car construction, and the condition of a lot of these older,
smaller capacity cars led to the rapid retirement of most of them in the period
after WWII. That said, a number of them
soldiered on into the 60’s, so this is a very useful series of models to bring
needed diversity to your transition era and earlier model fleets.
JOHN BARRY
Washington DC
9 April 2016
