I know generally that the only 60 foot passenger cars are coaches, combines and rpo’s. But when it comes to Life-Like’s long discontinued 60’ heavyweight passenger cars, there is also a pullman sleeper car, dining car, and observation car. were there ever any heavyweight 60’ versions of those 3 cars in design that life-like made, or were life-like’s heavyweight pullman sleeper, dining car and observation car based on imagination of someone at life-like?
Those cars go back to Varney. much older than LL and they were all made to fit the same mold. They are toy trains and not prototypes of anything, although some look like some real cars.
In actual fact, the LL 60’ cars trace their origins back to John English/PennLine, certainly not Varney, and had the longest continuous production run of any passenger cars in the hobby’s history, until Athearn’s 70-footers took the title recently.
The coach and combine were based roughly on N&W equipment but the rest were fictious. These shorty cars were very popular back in the 1950’s, when most hobbyists had tight radius “spaghetti-bowl” layouts that required passenger equipment of decidedly shorter length than the scaled prototype.
It would seem that the actual origins of these cars may be traceable back to a 1950’s LW editorial in MR, where Linn called for a division of classification among layouts, with the ones having less than 18" radii and requiring shorter rolling stock being classified as “Bantam” designs or layouts. While Linn’s nomenclature never did take root, PennLine began issuing its RTR shorty passenger equipment soon thereafter. About the same period, Mantua was offering a unique set of tinplate shorty cars as well, under the title “Pug” cars (perhaps a further allusion to LW’s classification scheme). Perhaps also worthy of note is that W.K.Walthers had offered very similar 60’ N&W commuter coaches, in kit form, since the 1940’s.
CNJ831