I’m looking at a 1946 NYC publicity photo showing a long unit train of red and gray Pacemaker boxcars being pulled by a Niagra. Were these cars typically run in a unit consist or would they have been mixed in with other priority freight? My online source tells me the NYC originally ran these lcl cars on its NY-Buffalo mainline serving major points in between. Later, a Boston-Buffalo train was added. I have a dozen of these cars in my fleet and wondered whether I should run them in their own train or with other high priority freight cars.
IIRC they were originally intended to run together in a solid block, sort of like an early unit train. I believe they even took some standard NYC cabooses and painted them to match the cars. However over time they stopped doing that and by maybe the mid-late fifties the cars could be found mixed with regular freight cars.
After posting the above I found a helpful link…
The official picture of the Pacemaker train with all of the cars on the train painted in the new scheme was pulled by a Mohawk, which is a dual service locomotive. Like the Southern Pacific Overnight train painted in special colors, it ran that way for a while and then the special cars were added to the other trains in time.
CZ
Originally many of the cars could not be used in interchange as they did not have dimensional data required to interchange. I believe there were two of the NYC 19xxx wood sheathed cabooses painted in the pacemaker scheme. There was also a passanger train of the same name, however it did not share the paint scheme. What was said earlier about running them was correct, so it depends on the era that you are modeling. If you happen to be modeling 1946 then they would be very likley ran in blocks of said cars, but it is my understanding they did not usually run solid trains of nothing but Pacemakers. I also believe there were brown Pacemakers, with the same lettering, however they were solid brown, box car red, or whatever color you want to call it. I have seen pictures taken of PC and even CR with Pacemaker paint but of course by then they were barely visible as Pacemakers.
Paul
Dayton and Mad River RR