MON F-Units Pained Red/Grey are for passenger trains.
MON F-Units in Black/Gold were for freight trains.
MON seems to be a rather tough road to model since it’s not real popular like N&W or B&O. Trying to find accurate HO scale MON passenger cars can be next to impossible. And those F-Units you have are extremely hard to come by!
However with the Black/Gold F3’s, it’s definitely possible to recreate a 1940’s/1950’s transition era freight. Might want to look up pictures to see what kind of cabooses were used in that time frame.
I take credit in part for getting Rapido to manufacture red/gray streamlined coaches. But they were pretty generic and priced at $85 apiece. So, I took a pass.
The black and gold passenger cars simply do not exist in HO scale.
So, I wound up buying Walthers unlettered silver coaches and painted six of them red and gray and six more black and gold.
I also have a set of IHC heavyweight red and gray cars.
In the later years (I don’t recall exactly when) as a money saving measure the Monon passenger fleet was painted in the black and gold scheme. This was while they were dropping passenger service as much as they could too.
Yeah, when I first started researching the Monon passenger service, I came across this type of photo and this kind of discussion about the use of troop cars and hospital cars. It must have been for budgeting reasons. Monon never seemed to bother with high quality passenger cars like a lot of the bigger road names did.
I had not intended nor expected to see this much interest in the Monon. But it is a delightful little railroad, and it sure caught the eye of Lance Mindheim.
The budget streamliners of Monon, I believe, were a product of John W. Barriger III’s economy measures. Kind of a last-ditch ‘do-or-die’ effort. The cars were pretty well appointed inside and they were done on a shoestring budget.