I’ve been thinking about selecting one or two cars to install with sound for some of my passenger diesel consists. Idea would be to have a car to move between various roads behind the road specific DCC diesel so as not to have to reconvert several locos that are already DCC but not sound.
The question is which types of car are most likely to be seen in headend revenue service, especially with ownership by someone other than the one hauling the mixed revenue/ passenger unit? For example, I’ve got a wood side reefer marked for the Frisco. Is it likely to have seen revenue service anywhere in the U. S. or would it have only have shown up pretty much west of the Mississippi?
Also, what other type of headend revenue cars would work?
Does it have express trucks on it? A head end car would generally not have normal freight trucks, otherwise the whole train would have to slow to freight speeds.
Probably pretty much just on the FRISCO. Head end cars most often matched the home road.
Other than the RPO and baggage? I guess Santa Fe had horse cars, so others would have as well.
Express box cars and especially express reefers are your most likely candidates. Now, these weren’t your ordinary reefers and box cars. The express reefers were commonly 50-feet long. Both would be appropriately lettered (often REA) and also equipped with steam lines, emergency signal lines, and high-speed trucks/wheels. Since they were designed to fit into passenger trains, they were technically passenger, not freight, cars. This traffic all but disappeared in the 1960s. Ordinary baggage cars carrying express are also a possibility. Depending on the route, such cars could be lettered for another railroad. For example, the baggage car might be lettered CBQ or NYC on SP’s Overland route from Ogden to Oakland or lettered for NP on SP’s Shasta Route from Portland to Oakland.
Baggage cars were used as mail storage cars and commonly were interchanged between railroads.
RPO’s normally stayed on the home road, but there were exceptions.
Express box cars and express refrigerator cars as noted already would have high speed trucks. They also would have steam hoses. These cars were interchanged. Railway Express Agency was owned jointly by most major railroads, and ther cars were interchanged throughout North America. .
PRR baggage and express cars traveled the country and could be seen anywhere. There were two reasons. It was the 500# gorilla owning over 10% of all cars on the rails and numerous publishers in the New York and Philadelphia areas shipped magazines such as Life, Look and The Saturday Evening Post by priority rail. In addition to the B60b consider PRR R50b express cars both available from Walthers and both unique to the PRR. Most never ever came near a car washer as they were cut off from trains at Penn Station and in Philadelphioa for reloading and off on another trip. The result was extremely dirty cars where even the numbers were hardly discernable so you can not overweather one any more than the PRR did
I’d think a Railway Express Agency express reefer would be a good choice. They went pretty much everywhere.
BTW you could install a two-wire mini-plug so that the reefer would just have the sound decoder with no speaker, each engine would have it’s own speaker in it. When you connect the reefer behind the engine, you could plug in the two-wire plug so the sound would come out of the speaker in the engine, rather than from the reefer.
I don’t dispute what you say, but as far as particular train compositions, it all depends. For example, examining a sample of consist lists for the SP Mail (train nos. 21 and 22) running on the Ogden-Oakland Overland route, the ratio of NYC to Penn baggage/express cars was something like 30 or 50 to 1 in favor of NYC. For whatever reason, the NYC favored SP and the Penn didn’t. Does anyone know why?
Perhaps the connections just worked out better between SP and NYC than between SP and the Pennsy, so they worked out an arrangement to forward each other’s mail & express cars. Maybe Pennsy already had a similar arragement with the Santa Fe or someone else.
Another idea would be to get a sound-equipped demonstrator for the era you model, and run that as the second unit behind the regular passenger power. Any road could use a demonstrator. Life-Like (back before the Walthers takeover) made a Proto 2000 E8 EMD demonstrator in blue and silver. I have one, it looks great and runs very nicely. Pretty easy to install a sound decoder in it, if you put the speaker in the rear and coupled it back to back with another passenger diesel, it would be hard to tell that the sound is coming from the rear unit and not the lead one.
You could do the same thing with an F-unit demonstrator, or even a GP demonstrator. Atlas made models of the three GP-7 demonstrators from 1949 that are very nice.
BTW that might work better than putting the sound decoder in a car, I suspect in the car you’re always going to have some problems with pickup and the decoder losing power and restarting every so often.
The NYC traffic came to the SP Overland via UP and CNW, so I assume there was a CNW-NYC connection. Interestingly … the New York traffic varied not only by season but also within the week. Since there were little originations from Chicago or New York on Sundays, SP westbound traffic over Nevada was light on Wednesdays for absent New York traffic and Tuesdays for absent Chicago traffic. So guys, vary your passenger consists; don’t just run the same consist everyday.
The PRR also used its ubiquitous X29 Boxcar in Express services as it was low enough to go under the wires in Penn Station. It like the B60’s and RB50’s never were washed.