I have always been curious as to what years the prototype of MDC’s 50’, 60’ and 80’ passenger car kits would have travelled the rails. Tell me if i am close or way off as to decade the above mentioned cars would have been around.
50’ Pullman/Overland 1890’s, 80’ 1905ish and 60’ 1920’s.
Off the top of my head, those date eras are pretty close for when the designs were introduced. Keep in mind that cars had long lives, then were often recycled into MOW or other company service. The wood cars had shorter lives, because of the push to put passengers into steel equipment for better crash protection, but I don’t think it was mandated so much as tech advancing to make it possible relatively quickly.
I believe the prototypes of the 60’ cars lasted into the 50s/60s, but I think only one or two were real, the rest simply shortie versions of common cars to go with (the coach??) to make a complete train.
Wooden passenger cars with open platforms were the rule in the early days, of course. Wooden cars with enclosed narrow vestibules came into use before the 1880’s, but full-width vestibules were first applied to wooden cars in 1893, according to John H. White’s two-volume THE AMERICAN RAILROAD PASSENGER CAR (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). The MDC 80-foot cars are pepresentative of this type. Wooden construction continued for several years, but the first large-scale production of steel cars began around 1903-6. The older wooden cars continued in service until replaced. Wooden cars were subject to deterioration and expensive maintenance, so many were retired, modified, or transferred to Company service once the steel cars came into widespread use. The general design represented by MDC’s Harriman cars appears to have been introduced around 1906.
The Model Die Casting Pullman Palace car was reviewed in the August 1967 MR which noted that it was a wood truss-rod car built by Pullman in 1903 for the Santa Fe and Rock Island
The review noted that some similar wood cars lasted in MOW service into modern times and indeed I have photos of Soo Line wood passenger cars in work train service in the early 1980s (and none were saved!).
Dave Nelson
Open platform wooden passenger cars in passenger service lasted into the 50’s on the Maryland and Pennsylvania RR and probably other shortline railroads as well. In the Maryland and Pennsylvania’s case the cars that lasted that long were built before WWI, 1902-1913. The bodies were 50’ long, 56’4" over the platforms.
One thing to be aware of is that the 50’ Roundhouse cars had duckbill roofs and crescent roofs. I don’t know when the switch occurred, but I have a kit from the 70’s with the duckbill and current pictures of RTR cars show the crescent.
Enjoy
Paul
50’ cars like the MDC ones were built by Pullman into the 1880’s. The 80’ Pullman Palace Car started to be built in the 1890’s, and continued into the first decade or so of the 20th century. By about 1910, steel cars started to be produced almost exclusively. I believe the round-roof Harriman cars were fairly early steel cars, going back to the 1905-1910 period.
RPOs were often the earliest steel cars on a railroad, because federal regulations required RPOs furnished by the railroads to have steel underframes around 1900, and to be all steel around 1910 for safety of the postal employees sorting mail.
Stix,
Good point on the RPOs, as that definitely required the RRs to update sooner than they otherwise would’ve.
There was at least one or two exceptions to that rule, on the Colorado narrowgauge lines. The Rio Grande continued to use wood RPOs until that service ended (I think with the last run of the San Juan). They were forced to strengthen the cars by adding rail as collision posts at the front of the car and steel panels along the lower sides, both which are easily visible in pics of theswe cars. I think the C&S NG also handled things this way, but that’s out of my area of expertise.
I imagine a few passengers were upset when they found out the RPOs on their train were all steel, because steel cars were safer for the RPO clerks…while the passengers were riding in wood cars. Not surprising railroads decided to convert to new all steel cars ASAP.