Help! I am getting conflicting info about this book. The title would suggest it is mostly post 1946 and i read in a discussion group that it is. But I am also seeing it billed as :
The postwar freight car fleet : North American freight car designs from 1898 to 1947.
I model the thirties and if it does cover 1898 to 1947 I would be very interested in it. Does anyone have this book and can you tell me exactly what is in it? It is a strange name if it actully does have all of this prewar stuff in it.
Thanks in advance!
Basicly it covers the car as they appeared post WW2. Some cars built as early as 1898 were still in service, often with minor modifications and usually in newer paint schemes.
The pictures are from the late 40’s - mostly 1947 followed by 1946 and 1948. They were mostly taken in Harrisburg, PA. A brief history of each car type is presented followed by pictures of that type. The pictures cover cars built over the time span indicated (1898-1947) but as they appeared in the late 40’s. For example the first boxcar pictured was built in 1900, but the photograph was taken in 1947. The second boxcar was built in 1906, picture 1947, the third was built in 1922, picture 1946, and so forth.
While the photo captions provide some information about the car, it’s not detailed enough to understand what the car looked like at a pre WWII point in time like say 1935. For modeling purposes this book seems to be most useful for the time period of eary 40’s to early 50’s.
OTOH it is a very good book as a snapshot in time, the time being 1947.
Enjoy
Paul
Specifically, it is a 230+ page book made up mostly of photographs of freight cars that came through Harrisburg, Pennsylvania on the Reading and the Pennsylvania railroads over a period from 1947-49.
It is divided into chapters by type of freight car, with several pages of introduction in each chapter. These introductions include comments on the size of the national fleet, the common designs, and the major changes in car construction over the first half of the twentieth century. The photo captions are fairly extensive.
The cars depicted in the photos come from all over the country, but there are (understandably) quite a few more East Coast roads represented. Given the location, there is a lot of Reading and Pennsylvania equipment, though there are plenty of boxcars and refrigerator cars from lines much farther west.
Thanks for the info guys. I think I will pass. Does anyone know of a more appropriate book for the '30s and earlier. Especially one with some drawings - I am thinking about scratchbuilding some rollingstock.
Thanks again.
If you can find one at a reasonable price, the Simmons-Boardman Car Builder’s Cyclopedia has a wealth of information. I have a 1940 issue and a 1970. I refer to it frequently as a reference tome. 1350 pages of both Passenger and freight car designs and photographs. Original copies can run well over $100 but there are occasional deals to be found if you are patient.
Kalmbach reprinted the 1940 edition. They can also be found reproduced on CD or DVDs. There’s also copies of the Train Shed Cyclopedia which are smaller, more specific reprints from different Cyclopedias at a reasonable cost.
Take a look at that nefarious auction site and search “car Builders Cyclopedia” or “Car Builder’s Dictionary” and see what comes up. For your location, the CD or DVD version might be an economical choice!
Here’s one example:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/1916-Car-Builders-Dictionary-Rail-Car-Plans-for-Scratch-Builders-on-DVD-/171561876335?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item27f1e27b6f
Good Luck, Ed
Ed’s suggestion of older Car Builder’s Cyclopedias for your chosen era(s) is a good one. They do command collector’s prices, particularly as you get to the very old ones, but have photos and often drawings, sometimes of a rather technical nature. Decades ago a series of “Trainshed Cyclopedias” reprinted select portions of older Car Builder’s (and Locomotive Builder’s) Cyclopedias and they are not uncommon at swap meets.
If you have the All Access Pass to the MR Digital Archives, many of the wonderful prototype drawings by J Harold Geissel featured freight cars of your era, often with a photo or two as well. Those drawings appeared regularly from the late 1940s to the 1980s. Finding drawings in the index can be a chore. At one time MR published an index by George Drury just of published drawings but it is long out of print.
And don’t overlook the old Model Railroader Cyclopedias from the 1940s, where every few years Al Kalmbach would gather together just about all the prototype drawings in MR from 1934 to whenever and publish them together in a hard bound book. Lots of older freight car drawings are in those Cyclopedias. Again they are not uncommon at swap meets.
At one time MR also offered “plan packs” of drawings of freight cars and those too can be found at swap meets. The packs were not all freight cars.
A classic book “The North American Freight Car” by White has great photos and information.
And harder to track down perhaps but many of the railroad historical society magazines have published freight car drawings, or at least the somewhat crude roster drawings, over the years.
Dave Nelson
Thanks guys. Great info. I have already found some of the said publications at a reasonable price on the net and was able to purchase them and I will search my MR 75 yr DVD for Geoarge Drury.
Thanks again!
The index of drawings by George Drury was a separate pamphlet or booklet published by Kalmbach. It would be a nice thing for them to put it up on the All Access Pass, but it was not an article in an issue in MR, rather it was a separate publication.
Dave Nelson