I think this was a flea market find many years ago but I really can’t remember:
I’ve acquired many NKP freight cars over the years because my fictional railroad interchanges with the NKP in Buffalo. I don’t think I gave it much thought until recently but I’m curious as to why this one is painted silver instead of boxcar red like all my other NKP boxcars.
I’m thinking two possibilities. Could it have been for a priority freight service like the NYC Pacemaker service. Or could it have been intended as an express boxcar intended to be run in passenger train service with silver Budd passenger cars.
Any other ideas?
OOPS: I posted the wrong picture. I just corrected that.
I had painted up a Kadee PS-1 (a close substitute) in aluminum but when it came to trying to apply the 50 year-old Champ decals they simply disintegrated in the water.
Just to expand a little on Dave H’s answer…after WW2, several railroads experimented with aluminum (or aluminium for our UK friends) freight cars; generally these were not painted but left in their natural silvery color. I know GN had some silver aluminum boxcars for example.
Around the same time, a number of railroads began using stainless steel streamlined passenger cars. Some railroads that had these cars painted their steel express boxcars and/or refrigerator cars (or even some older heavyweight passenger cars) silver to match (more or less) the color of their stainless steel passenger cars.
The NKP 8500-8509 were constructed for head end service in 1947. Materials were supplied by Reynolds Aluminum. At the same time, RI 20060-20069, M&St.L 1000-1018 (even numbers only), ALTON 1200-1209 and C&O 2900-2909 appeared. Around this time, World War II had ended and the Korean War had not yet begun, so there was a surplus of aluminum. See the Sunshine Models product description on the Steam Era Freight Cars website and the MR magazine (page 34 of the Mar. 2003 issue). 1045
So I have not found my NKP model yet, but here are the C&O aluminum hoppers.
And a C&O aluminum box car that really is aluminum, offered by Globe, likely soon after the prototypes hit the rails in 1947 - but they got the car number half wrong…