Hello all
OK, I know how steam locomotives are called things like 0-8-0 and what that means. But I have been looking at the recent N scale Micro Trains Pullman cars online, trying to figure out what things like “10-1-2 Heavyweight Sleeper” mean. The numbers don’t seem to mean windows. Do they stand for seats?
JD
JD.
I am not a passenger train modeler but the numbers are a description of the building and layout of the car. A 10-1-2 would be a ten section, 1 lavatory, and 2 drawing rooms. Google Pullman projects for a great site and loads of info on not only Pullman cars but also ACF and other builders.
Pete
There was a recent thread about this very same question. I didn’t know what those numbers meant either until I saw that thread.
Here
Actually a 10-1-2 would be a 10 open sections, 1 drawing room, 2 compartments. If you search the forums, this question had come up a few times before…
http://cs.trains.com/TRCCS/forums/p/180542/1979638.aspx#1979638
Branchline trains website has some good information on Pullman cars.
[:)]
OK, I took a peek at the other thread. I have to say, I am still a bit confused. It seems passenger equipment is a whole other category with its own book of rules. It probably all makes more sense to folks who have actually been around such cars. To me, its all very foreign!
[?]
Pullman built and operated sleeping cars, and built different types of cars and interiors to fit different people’s desires and budgets.
The cheapest sleeping car berth was the open section. Each section had two seats facing each other. At night, the porter could fold the chairs backs down to create a bed, and an upper berth bed that normally in the day was up above the seats could be brought down to create an upper bed. Curtains could be drawn to allow for some privacy. (If you’ve ever seen the movie “Some Like It Hot”, a lot of the action takes place in a sleeping car like that.)
http://www.railswest.com/images/Pullman1890INT1.jpg
Although this was much better than sitting up all night in a coach seat, it wasn’t very private. People who had money could pay extra for a private sleeping area, like a compartment, bedroom or drawing room. The larger the space, the more you paid.
Many cars had more than one type of space available, so it might have open sections, bedrooms and compartments. The numbers like “12-1” or “10-1-2” are used to describe how many of each are inside; usually the first number indicates how many open sections there are. Unlike steam engine’s Whyte system, they’re not going front-to-back but describing in totat what is inside the car.
Actually, there;s an American and Candian style of numbering. The American car numbers read # open berth, #compartment, # Drawing. The Canadian number reads from one of the car to the other. Thus an American 6-6-4 is a Canadian 6-4-6. That said, seeing as how most cars were built by the American Pullman and American Budd companies, they tended to stick with the American numbering schemes, but the Canadian varient does pop up, and the diffewrence tripped up Rapido. From the newsletters it sounded like they got a lot of “Great Northern never owned any 6-4-6 sleepers.” Yes they did, here;s the numbering schemse we used." “OH, you mean the 6-6-4s.” “Isn;t that what we said?”
Interesting!! The point I was making was that a 10-1-2 wouldn’t necessarily have 10 open berths at one end, and one compartment and two drawing rooms at the other end. It might have the 10 berths in the middle, with a compartment at one end of the car and two drawing rooms at the other. Since the OP referenced the Whyte system, I thought he might be confused because he was assuming the numbers were in order of where the sections or compartments or whatever were in the car “front to back”, which they aren’t.