I am in the process of developing a freight car fleet for my layout. I need to aquire cars appropriate for may era (1981); and a sizeable home road fleet (Kansas City Southern). No duplicate numbers as I use car cards for switching and duplicate numbers could be a problem.
My layout will also need a good size unit coal fleet (BN/KCS/SEPX/GSU/KCLX). A few years ago I bought 25 MDC five bay coal hoppers to letter for Kansas City Power and Light. I painted them flat black and assembled the cars. I learned quickly that decaling that many cars was not a lot of fun and after several years only 5 of of the cars are completely lettered (they are all running on the layout). Building a unit coal fleet is getting easier to do as multiple numbered sets are being released.
I have also tried buying lettered cars and changing the reporting marks. This seems doable but finding the appropriate decal number sets to match existing paint and numbers can be a problem. From time to time multiple numbered sets of cars are issued, but these can be costly and hard to find.
How do you approach developing your freight car fleet?
As long as your car card system keeeps track of the physical location of the car (you keep the car cards moving with the cars and separate them by tracks in the yards, you can have duplicate car numbers, especially in a large fleet.
You ought to try modeling the TOC (turn of the century) era, pre-WW1. Not only do you have to letter your cars, but you have to scratchbuild, kitbash or assemble craftsman kits to build them. I rarely buy any rolling stock from a hobbyshop or train show because the major manufacturers don’t make any models of cars before the 1920’s. Don’t have to waste time reading magazine ads either.
When I was modeling the 1950’s I would assemble cars in groups of 3’s. That is enough to get a group done, but not so many that it felt like I would never finish them. Try that. I rarely did renumbering. Most of the time I either used the stock lettering or stripped it to bare plastic, detailed it and completely painted and lettered it.
My N scale fleet has grown to over 300 cars. Over the last few years, I’ve undertaken the process of re-numbering the duplicates, again, due to car card and waybill issues. But I also keep track of maintenance issues, so it’s helpful to pull a car from the yard, jot down the number and what the problem is, and fix it later when I get a “round tuit”.
This is especially helpful with over a hundred coal hoppers, 50 of which look more or less the same.
As for building the collection, I’ve obviously bought a lot of them new, but I also like to scrounge through junk boxes at train shows and pick up carcasses that I can resurrect. Here’s a few of my “Lazarus” cars…
These are old Trix quad hoppers, dating from the early 70’s. You can usually find these in box lots with broken couplers or missing pieces. I spray them black and letter them for my Laurel Valley Ry.
This is an old Atlas box, repainted and lettered with MicroScale decals.
This one’s my favorite. It was one of those ubiquitous Trix gondolas, they turn up on Ebay pretty frequently for a couple of bucks. I repainted it, added some floor details and weathering, and lowered the ride height by filing down the bolsters.
Accurail makes lettered but unnumbered car sets and the appropriate decals to match. I don’t know if they have the specific type of car you are looking for but it might be worth it to check out their website.
To your main point. For an actual specific layout, I develop a car fleet by first making a list of an appropriate mix of both car type and road name. Aquistion depends upon if it is for a client that wants them “right now” or if it can be a very slow process over time. For the timed approach a spreadsheet is great to watch the percentages of actuals coming in line with the desired.
Most of my original ‘fleet’ from the late 60’s/early 70’s were upgraded Athearn/MDC freight cars. Most were custom painted/decaled/weathered to match either commercial decal sets or pictures I took while railfanning. These cars served me well and were the ‘core’ of my operational fleet. When Bev-Bel and other started doing runs of cars that were not available from Athearn/MDC, I bought a lot of them and touched up the paint jobs and and did some light weathering.
Then Kadee and the other ‘super’ cars came along. Even my good looking repaints did not match the details on this new generation of highly detained cars. And they stood out in a train! I started selling off the old cars at Train Shows and when the first Rib Side Productions cars came out, I unloaded my 23 car Milwaukee Road boxcar fleet.
This time around I started ‘planning’ what was need to operate my layout and developed a list of car types/railroads that would be needed for operation. I also developed a set of standards:
Metal wheel sets
Trucks/couplers ‘screwed on’ to the frame
Correct NMRA weight from the start
Kadee roof walks on upgraded ‘BB’ type cars
Real metal grab irons(I built a jig for drilling the holes)
Coupler lift bars on the ends
Complete the ‘plumbing’ under the car(my layout is 48" - 56" off the floor and at eye level these thing show)
This is being applied to RTR, custom painted/decaled, or scratch-built cars. So far I have about 50 cars completed, and about 40-50 more in the works. All cars have the paint schemes/number verified by roster or actual picture for a 50’s era operation. It is amazing how much time can be put into a single ‘BB’ or ‘RTR’ type of car! I have been going through a lot of my old Champ decal stock and even sen
My fleet consists of anything built up to the year 1967, I model roughly 1955-1967. I just go to the LHS, train shows, garage sale that say they have trains, and buy what ever cars I can find built from late 40’s-1967. I weather all mine as I buy, as said in the latest MR, in the artical about detailing your layout, don’t get a bunch of rare cars but alot of common ones. Mike
Good point Larry! Many folks buy whatever catches their eye(nothing ‘wrong with that’) and do not have enough of the correct cars for their industries. I accumulate lots of stuff that has nothing to do with what is on my layout, and that stuff winds up in the boxes or in the display case.
I was looking to match car orders for manufactured goods(like appliances) shipped from the east to my little area of Western Wisconsin. I had lots of MILW/CNW/CGW box cars, but only one P&LE boxcar. I wound up building a NH ‘Script’ box car, and a PRR ‘Keystone’ box car just to build up a ‘pool’ of Eastern cars(not everything will be in a returning MILW boxcar). I also had to build some more 70t 2-bay covered hoppers for the zinc concentrate being shipped out of my branch line. I had lots of these cars for CGW/MSL/CNW/CRIP that would be in ‘cement’ business and ‘arrive’ at my industries, but I really did not have a dedicated pool of MILW 70t LO’s to support the 2-3 cars a day being shipped from this major on-line industry.
Now what i did was, i first chose my railroad (conrail in 1997) then looked at railraodes that may interchange with this railroad (UP,CSX,NS, BNSF). When I finshed that i Looked at where my layout is located like Western PA with coal, so i bought the right cars. then to avoid the same road numbers, use some paint and fix it like 6 to a 8. Also, the best cars for your money is like Athearn bluebox, WALTHERS , and ATHEARN RTR CARS . Thats my [2c]
The nice thing about picking a road and era is you will know what cars to use, and what not to use. For me, its loads of trix quad hoppers, MicroTrains offset and ribside twins, and whatever OS 3 bay roundhouse kits i can scrounge, all painted black and awaiting some B&O decals. Add some Red Caboose X-29s (repainted and also awaiting decals) and a few scratchbuilt wagontops, and i am all set. I will add a few cars from other roads, but in the 40s (i model 1948) 95% of the cars i see in pics of B&O trains are B&O cars, with most of the rest being from WM and Pennsy (go figure, these 3 interchanged a lot)
My freight car fleet consists of two distinct groups:
Japan National Railways cars - renumbered to match numbers I saw and recorded between 1962 and 1968, approximately 1/700th of the 1964 JNR roster, somewhat heavy in long flats and long drop-borrom hoppers, light in oddballs and one-of-a-kinds unlikely to appear in my modeled area.
Tomikawa Tani Tetsudo cars - interchange coal units and non-interchange miscellaneous.
Thanks to modeling a specific place with specific traffic patterns, once my layout is fully operational 79 percent of the cars that pass through Tomikawa will come from staging and go back into staging, some after being cut from through freights for forwarding by local peddlers (or vice versa.) 20 percent will run from staging to some industry on the modeled part of the railroad for loading or unloading. Only one percent of the cars will move from one point in the visible world to another point in the visible world - and most of them will be non-interchange cars running on the staging-free TTT.
If you have cars which don’t have logical origins and destinations on your layout, don’t let that bother you. Just run them through as part of manifests that only stop for an engine change, a crew change or not at all.
Since I model a freelanced belt line as my primary freight carrier, I got to make several choices that make my fleet much more manageable. The fully freelanced part of the fictional road I model is older and has more turns acording to my “history” as such there is a newer line that handles almost all of the intermodal and oversized loads including autoracks. My modeled portion is limited more to seasonal grain traffic, locals and traffic for the timber industry, but the primary reason this line stays open is the heavy commuter rail traffic that operates on it. There is also an urban switching portion I’m designing for the layout, with tighter clearances.
As such, I have mostly covered hoppers, boxcars, centerbeams and bulkhead flat cars with a few other specialty cars as well as a couple short CP-style unit coal trains.
The fleet breaks down thusly:
Covered Hoppers: from a variety of manufacturers, in order to reflect the wide number of cars used in seasonal grain rushes. Most are Athearn kits for price reasons but I’ve also got Intermountain, Atlas and Walthers cars too.
Boxcars: Again from many different companies, but mostly Athearn with some Walthers, Branchline Trains, Atlas and even a few Herpa models to make the line seem more Canadian.
Centerbeams: All Walthers thanks to the fact that they keep releasing new road numbers so I don’t have to re-number them myself. Eventually I want to try the kitbashing how-to in an issue of MR I have in order to make the shorter prototype models as well.
Bulkheads: Walthers and Athearn, both from kits and RTR. These are in a variety of sizes from Athearn 60’ to Walthers 54’ GSCs. I’ve also got several of the Walthers 50’ Canadian prototype cars to keep the setting.
Other: A little of this and that, whatever could show up on trains on or near a major city. I’ve got a couple of the Walthers coil cars, some tank cars and gondolas that appear
