2012 Strasburg O Scale Show – October

I attended the Fall Strasburg Show today. I have to say that was a good show today for me. I got the chance to catch up with a lot of folks today and I came home with a lot of stuff. I hope everybody else there also had a good show.

There were lots on new things to see and learn about today. RCS America was at the show demonstrating their new Raillinx System. I was impressed with their system and the way it was installed on their sample models. Dead Rail is getting closer to being a reality.

I also got to look at the new Weaver Milwaulkee Boxcar. Bob Hiel had a pilot model from Weaver on his table today. Below are images of the car:

One thing I always enjoy about going to a Strasburg Show, is just being in the Amish country. Even their parking lot are fun to look at.

Standard Boxcars? Over represented?

 

Model manufacturers love the “Standard” Boxcars. We have commercial models of the USRA Single Sheathed, the 1937 AAR, and the Pullman Standard PS-1. The reason is easy, build one model and paint it in all the roads that owned them. This gives them a great chance to recover their investment in die work for the models. The trouble for us modelers is that it’s easy to have some car types over represented in our freight car fleets. It was worse back when there were fewer models but it still can get out of control fast.

There have been a number of articles and books published about the different “Standard” car types. I decided to do a little exercise the other day. I pulled out the different lists and began to plot the roads that had each of the “Standard” car types. Then I dug out my 52 ORER and found out how many total boxcars the roads that received the “Standard” cars had. That was a total of 769,711.

The total for the number of  “Standard” cars on the roster was  278,979 or 38% of the total cars on those roads. I cut off the PS-1 build numbers at August of 1952 which is when I’m modeling. These totals did not include any 50 foot cars or automobile cars of 40′ or 50′ length. That will be another post.

What does that really mean? If you believe that the free roaming cars like boxcars, flat cars and gondolas will be proportional to the number of actual cars on the prototype rosters (except for home road cars), then a little more than a third of the boxcars on your railroad should be of the “Standard” cars. The other two-thirds of your boxcar fleet should be the automobile cars, the 50′ cars and the railroad designed cars, like the B&O wagon tops, or the Milwaukee Welded Ribbed cars.

If you were going to build 100 boxcars, the thought would be 38 of the cars would be of one of the “Standard” cars. The other 62 cars would be made up of the automobile cars, railroad designed cars and the 50 foot cars.

Now as far as what roads they should be, I believe that the roads that had the most cars of a type are the most likely to be seen based on the proportions, but that talk is for another time.

USRA SS
9756
2
USRA DS
5215
1
23 ARA
66,125
9
32 ARA
11,854
2
37 AAR
60,077
8
37 AAR mod
41,094
5
War Emergency Boxcars
5342
1
44 AAR
34,065
4
PS-1
46,271
6
Totals from the 1/52 ORER
279,079
38

A Nice Little Vacation

My wife and I just stepped away for a really nice little vacation in the Finger Lakes area of New York. We stayed in Watkins Glen, NY. Turns out our hotel room overlooked the old Northern Central/PRR line through town. This was part of the Elmira Branch above Elmira. I had studied the line from Elmira to Williamsport, PA with the idea of modeling it. I never did start the layout. I just could not put enough Reading into the layout.

The first day a Finger Lakes Railway local came right past our hotel. We didn’t see any other movement on the line the rest of our time there.

On the ride up we stopped at the Red Rose Diner in Towanda, PA. The service and the food was nice.

I did see a couple of station survivors while exploring the area. The upper image is from Montour Falls, NY also on the Elmira Branch. It’s now a doctor’s office.

The second station is from Hammonsport, NY and it is now a police station.

Just as you get into town in Watkins Glen the is the Millionaires’ row of campers/trailers. They looked nice but the locals were not too friendly.

Now that I’m relaxed from the nice vacation, it’s time to get back to the benchwork.