Happy Holidays!
Can anyone pls suggest what other foreign reporting marks would appear on an N&W layout set in the 1980s near Roanoke, VA? I have a few Virginian (VGN) and Southern (SOU). What about C&O? B&O? NKP? Yes, I know it’s “my” layout, but I’m going for somewhat realistic.
Thanks!
Definitely NKP and Wabash, even though the merger took place in 64 there were still cars lettered up into the 90’s.
Also you could never go wrong with PC/Conrail and SCL. Add in singles from SP, ATSF and BN as they are everywhere.
Rick Jesionowski
Essentially any reporting marks in service in the 1980’s.
Hoppers will be mostly N&W, tank cars will be private owners, gons will be mostly eastern roads and boxcars will show up in about the same proportion as they are part of the national fleet. That means that you would see way more CR (and predescessor road) boxcars than you will see FEC boxcars. There will also be a lot of the IPD boxcars (brightly colored shortline incentive per diem cars) and Railbox cars, since that was their heyday. Covered hoppers will be N&W and local roads or private owner cas for chemicals.
I would use V&O, AM, and SGRR,
But, you said you were going for realism.
For boxcars, I would imagine that nearly any road could make an appearance, but with more close ones being more common. I have read that gondolas and flat cars tended to stay closer to home, so avoid Western roads on these, maybe?
Why am I responding in the Prototype Information forum?
[:^)]
-Kevin
It depends a bit on what industries are on your layout. Things not made or grown in your layout’s area would be delivered from other parts of the country.
If you have a lumber yard, it’s quite likely they’re getting lumber from the Pacific Northwest in BN (or perhaps UP) boxcars for example. Large consumer goods manufactured in the North or Midwest (like refrigerators or ovens) might come in baby hi-cube boxcars of ATSF or BN or Conrail. Gondolas with I-beams and other construction steel beams could come in cars lettered for any number of Midwest or “Rust Belt” railroads.
Keep in mind too c.1980 cars hadn’t fully been repainted from the then fairly recent mergers, so you could see a Great Northern car instead of BN, Pennsylvania (or PC) instead of Conrail, etc.
One thing I forgot Kaolin Tank Cars, Virginia is north of Georgia and there were a myriad of Private Owner Kaolin Tank cars that would be heading north out of Georgia, so one or two cars would be appropriate along with the brick hauling 40’ boxcars of the Southern and Central of Georgia.
https://www.maskislanddecals.com/product/southern-3/
Rick Jesionowski
Thanks everyone![;)] I’m bookmarking this stream. It helps knowing how to build out the freight car fleet a bit with non-N&W reporting marks.
I’m certainly no expert on the N&W, but it wouldn’t have surprised me if I were railfanning the N&W, and a car from anywhere in North America just happened to show-up in the train’s consist.
In the '80s there were three local railroads near where I live in southern Ontario (Canadian National, Canadian Pacific, and the Toronto Hamilton & Buffalo. On many days, I saw American rolling stock in just about every train that went by, and there were ones from Mexican railroads, too.
While Norfolk & Western was more regional than is Norfolk Southern, I can’t imagine that it was so “isolated” that other roads didn’t show-up occasionally or maybe even on a regular basis.
I’ve added many U.S. and a couple Mexican cars for use on my freelanced railroad, mainly because it replicates what I saw from day-to-day. I doubt that an occasional “foreign” car on your layout would make it less prototypical.
Wayne
NAFTA (and I think other trade agreements) in the 1990s took away a lot of the restrictions about trade between the US, Canada, and Mexico, so the number of non-US cars seen in the US (and vice-versa) greatly increased then. Before that, it did happen, but it was much more limited because one country’s cars could only be in the other country for like 72 hours.
New York Central (and later Conrail) operated a line across lower Ontario between Buffalo and Detroit; it was mostly used to run US freight straight through from the east to the midwest so the cars were only in Canada a short time generally.
BTW an example of “cars can go anywhere”…New York Central and Northern Pacific needed refrigerator cars during different times of year, so agreed to pool their cars. So you could see an NYC reefer being loaded with apples in Washington state, or an NP car being loaded with oranges in Florida.
Yeah, the CASO was one of my favourites, and I have several cars lettered for it.
The Central also ran into my hometown of Hamilton, Ontario, both as passenger trains and with freight.
As a kid, I recalled seeing the Js running past our house on an elevated right-of-way, a couple of blocks from one of the city’s train stations. They also went from there to Toronto.
The hometown TH&B bought two J’s from the Central, and in earlier days (1941), also purchased 300 USRA double-sheathed boxcars, built in 1918 by ACF, from the New York Central.
The TH&B also borrowed a Berkshire from the Central, for tests on hauling heavy trains up the Niagara Escarpment. Impressed by their performance, TH&B ordered two Berkshires, built by Montreal Locomotive Works - the only two operated by a Canadian road.
I have had a longstanding admiration for the Central’s trains, and especially their locos.
Wayne
While any standard gauge railroad in the US, Canadian, and to a certain extent, Mexican railroad system is fair game for interchange, certainly the railroads the N&W directly interchanged with could be expected to me more commonly seen. The interchange list can be found in the equipment register but also on a good map of the railroad.
This is one reason why I like going to “railroadiana” train shows in addition to model train shows. Seeing actual switch lists and wheel reports for my favorite railroad give a very good sense of where I should concentrate my foreign road rolling stock.
Another basis for deciding is the size of railroad. It has sometimes been said that EVERYONE is (or should be) a Pennsylvania Railroad modeler because it was so huge and had so many freight cars that every railroad played host to Pennsy cars, even without a direct interchange. Ditto for other huge railroads such as New York Central, C&O, Santa Fe, and the list goes on.
When one thinks of the N&W one thinks of coal mining. That in turn makes one think of big equipment, big machines. Bucyrus Erie (on the C&NW), Caterpillar (on the CB&Q but also the TP&W, Nickel Plate and all the other Peoria railroads). Allis Chalmers on the Milwaukee Road and C&NW.
Dave Nelson
I’m a bit surprised that no one has mentioned the Chessie System. It would have the advantage of being mostly new paint jobs, and, besides, it has a cat I can like.
An interesting thread with a common answer of almost anything could be seen that was totally foreign to the railroad it was on.
It reminds me of here in the U.K. the BBC wanted to know where containers travelled to, They had a container specially painted with BBC on it and tracked it for a year.
It soon made its way to China and remained over there for a few weeks.
Over the Pacific Ocean it arrived on the west coast of the U.S.A…
It travelled all around U.S.A. and Canada to eventually arrived on the east coast before leaving for Argentina.
David
As I said, boxcars generally showed up as a proportion of the national fleet. A railroad with 100,000 boxcars (CR) would be more likely to been seen anywhere than a railroad with a couple hundred boxcars. The exceptions being any cars SPECIFICALLY for one customer on your layout. SP 40 ft 100 ton boxcars would probably only be seen on routes that ran to a copper smelter.
On the other hand, hopper cars tended to stay on home roads, not exclusively, but you were more likely to see N&W hoppers on and N&W coal train than MP hoppers.
Gons tended to be from where the shipper was located. In Houston in the 1980’s drill stem (pipe for wells) tended to show up in eastern road gons from rolling mills in the east. Rock from central Texas showed up in home road or private road gons.
Reefers were from pretty much anywhere, mostly from where the shipper was.
Chemical covered hoppers and tank cars were almost exclusively private owner. Tank cars of any type were private owner (except from the tiny handful in company service). Grain, soda ash and potash covered hoppers were either private owner or from the railroad where the shipper was located.
Unit trains generally had cars from the same owner, having said that, the 1980’s were dawn of the large mergers, so in the case of CR, BN, UP, the “same owner” could involve cars from a half dozen pre-merger railroads.
I agree with the neighboring railroad philosophy. I model the Milwaukee, but I have a few cars from the Ann Arbor and Port Huron and Detroit lines. These are plain, unspecific boxcars I found at train shows, but they are exactly the kind of things I would expect to find in my Transition Era modeling.
For getting cars for my freelance railroad, I think of it kind of like the rings of a bullseye.
The center would be cars lettered for my railroad.
The next ring out would be railroads it would directly connect to if it were real - since my railroad runs in Minnesota, Wisconsin, with a line into western Ontario, there are a lot of cars for C&NW, Great Northern, Milwaukee Road, etc.
The next ring would be the railroads those railroads connect to. So for example, the Minneapolis & St.Louis connected to the Santa Fe in Illinois, and hauled reefers coming from the west from Illinois to Minneapolis. So my railroad could be getting PFE reefers and ATSF freight cars from the M-St.L and taking them to points on my railroad. Similarly, CB&Q had a run-thru agreement with New York Central from Chicago to St.Paul, so eastern railroads like NYC, Pennsy, or B&O could show up too.
As each connection/ring gets farther from the center, the number of cars from those railroads become less…you could still see a Seaboard or T&P show up once in a while, but for every one of them there would be maybe 6-8 cars from the inner ring railroads.
A common ratio is 50% home, 25% connecting and 25% other and I have also seen it as 33%-33%-33%. Same “bullseye” type concept. I will add that it depends on era, modern eras have way more private cars and probably should be a percentage themselves.
The other consideration is what industries you have, that could drive the mix. For example if I was modeling the area around Spring, TX in the 1980’s where I worked, the mix would be more like 50% private, 25% system and 25% other roads, with minimal connecting roads. The majority of the cars would be chemical cars and auto racks, which would be private cars. Then the wood chiips and rock would be in system cars. Paper, lumber and steel products would be either eastern road cars or Canadian cars , with very few connecting road cars.
In addition to CN and CP, Central Vermont, Duluth Winnipeg & Pacific, Ontario Northland and maybe even BC Rail/Pacific Great Eastern cars would show up if you have a printing plant or lumberyard that receives shipments from the great white north.
CN/CV/DWP newsprint service boxcars had yellow doors during this era, on lumber boxes they were green.
http://www.cnrphotos.com/gallery2/main.php?g2_itemId=25129
http://canadianfreightcargallery.ca/cgi-bin/image.pl?i=cn561800&o=cn
http://canadianfreightcargallery.ca/cgi-bin/image.pl?i=cvc402958&o=cv
http://www.cnrphotos.com/gallery2/main.php?g2_itemId=21766
CP painted the entire car green to designate forest product service boxcars, and in the 1980s there would still have been some still in the pre-1968 Script liveries to go along with the Multimarks.
https://i0.wp.com/www.blackcatdecals.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/cp80167.jpg?fit=891%2C356&ssl=1
Because of the rules regarding car usage and subsequent dollars involved a railroad initiating a load would use its own cars to maximize revenue. so incoming freight would be a lot of non home road cars, the bulk of outgoing would be Norfolk and Western ln your case. the exceptions are cars in dedicated service and cars that are in short supply like gondolas that a yard master holds knowing he has an on line customer that needs a steady supply of those cars.
Revenue is the same regardless of what car the shipment is loaded in. If the rate is $1.50 per ton, it’s the same whether it’s a home road car or a foreign car.
Revenue is allocated by what railroads are in the route, which railroads originate, terminate or switch the car, regardless of whether its a home road or foreign car. The owner of the car doesn’t get a share of the revenue.
The car service rules are written to do the opposite, to encourage railroads to load foreign general service cars, since per diem/car hire is charged whether the car is loaded or empty.