Thursday, November 16, 2017

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. . .




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