The engines and cabooses i have are Sante Fe. The rest of my cars are vaious ones that are like the Illinois rainline, Northeast I think, some ont have a name, but the have miller high life and things like that, but dont say sante fe or anything. I am fine with that. How many of you would repaint it to match or trade with others to get them all to say sante fe.
Santa Fe, BN, BNSF cars are easy to find. Put them on your wish list for the holidays. I would not bother to repaint your other cars.
Depending on the time-frame you model, you could see all of those cars on any rail line anywhere in the states. I think the first to go were the billboard boxcars/reefers (If you were Anheuser-Bush you wouldn’t want to be shipping your Budweiser in a car advertising Miller now, would you?), but so long as the built/rebuilt dates on the cars fall within your operating timeline, you’re good to go.
Locomotives are pretty much the only thing you should have all lettered for the same road.
Granted this all assumes you’re trying to build a fictional division of the Santa Fe (or model a specific prototype city/location/whatever) – if you’re just wanting to run trains, buy whatever you want!
The billboard reefers were outlawed by the ICC. Ssmething about illegal advertizing as I recall. Quite a bit of study has gone into how many cars from what roads represent a prototype mixture. You wouldn’t ever have seen an 86’ box car with a 4-4-0 steamer as an example. Hoppers tend to run in groups from the same railroad since the loadings are at mines on a given railroad and you use your cars to maximize revenue. In the 50’s the PRR owned 10% of all cars and they were seen everywhere with most on the PRR. I would expect that whatever road being modeled is going to be well represented with cars from its own fleet. An ORER (Official Raiway Equipment Register) lists every car in interchange service as well as a wealth of other information. It lists the interchanges with other railroads, rates for cars, officers, number of engines, a description of AAR car types, every railroad runing and its reporting marks and physical dimensions and usage for every car as well as the numbers plus a lot more. Issued quarterly, they are yellow and old ones are discarded by the railroads. One for the period you model is an indispenable asset. They are the size of a major city yellow page phone book. However, to be ludicrous to make the example, if you are modeling a little know branch that served a single industry you wouldn’t expect to find the Super Chief with its all stainless cars running there. Same with freight cars. if it serves a mine the cars are going to be hoppers mostly with some box cars for equipment and supplies thrown in occasionally. And small shortlines that have 10 cars are rarely going to be seen. It is easy to collect a bunch of oddball stuff that really doesn’t lend itself to a prototype situation. It isn’t wrong if that is what you want. It is just that as knowledge grows and understanding so does what is needed to carry that out. When I was 18 I bought two UP passenger cars and ran them in my
As long as the locomotive and caboose have the same road name, you’re good.
On the North American continent, any car that could roll on standard gauge rails and wasn’t embargoed from interchange could find its way onto any railroad from the Springfield Terminal to the Santa Fe. That said, some kinds of loads would probably be found in home road cars (it isn’t likely that gravel would travel very far, or be interchanged from another rail line) while others would always be moved in foreign road cars. Manufactured products from the rust belt would have arrived in Albuquerque (on the Santa Fe) in cars with New York Central or Pennsylvania reporting marks.
As for beer reefers, they were banned by the Interstate Commerce Commission in the 1930s - so if you’re running diesels, those should be repainted. IIRC, MDT (Merchants’ Dispatch Transport) was the ATSF-connected reefer line. PFE was UP/SP.
Chuck (Modeling Central Japan in September, 1964)
I am going to do a something along a rural america themed layout is what i am thinking and have part of it running along the coast line. Im thinking of a cross between the 1930’s feel mixed with a more current feel in the layout. So i would be encampasing everything inbetween.
bit of a long timeframe there mate… you might want to narrow things down for a while – with the exception of buildings, very few things would survive that near 80 years of time.
1930s – steam, wood-sided cars (few all-steel) ~40’ or shorter automobiles from the teens into the 20s
40s – steam, some diesel, more all-steel construction (new cars), automobiles from the teens into the 20s
50s – steam/diesel (1st gen), probably the decline of the older wooden cars, new cars are longer than before, decline of/no passenger service decline of autos from the teens/20s
60s – diesel (1st gen?) all steel cars for the most part, decline of autos from the 30s+
70s – diesel (2nd gen), all steel cars, hideous autos
80s to now … diesel, all steel cars some pushing 85’, hideous autos til the mid-late '90s
everything post 1955 is probably a waste of time (no more steam [;)])
I will be using engines and rolling stock from the 70’s to current if i am not misataken, and the feel of the land will be more of the 30’s.
You don’t want all Santa Fe cars. UN railroads “interchange” cars between them, that is a car loaded on one railroad can be sent to a reciever on another railroad. So with the exception of some types of unit trains (typically coal or grain) it would be extremely rare to see all the cars in one train with one road name.
A really rough rule of thumb is you want 1/3 home road cars, 1/3 direct interchange cars and 1/3 everything else.
So if you are modeling the ATSF in Illinois then you would have 1/3 ATSF, 1/3 IC, NW, PRR, NYC, CN, etc, and 1/3 everything else (BAR, RDG, SOU, SP, CNW, MEC, FEC, etc).
Well, there you have a conundrum. The {land and} buildings could easily be built in the 30’s and still standing in the 70’s of course. We have buildings and houses around here from the 1700’s to mostly 1800’s and in Massachusettes, and Philly areas some areas have houses and buildings from the 1600’s!
The problem is your trains. I take it you are playing the “it’s my railroad and I’ll run what I wanna” game. ANd that is fine for you to do.
The 70’s still had cabooses, but current day obviously not for awhile. The FRED and ETD took over. Your caboose and engine SHOULD match, though something like a B&O caboose COULD have been seen following a C&O Engine early on, until all were replaced with C&O lettering or new cabooses altogether. MAny Chessie system equipment still bore its B&O or C&O heritage and numbers when repainted.
Billboards and refers are nice to look at, but were outlawed many many years ago as I understand it because of the advertising issue and the fact that thieves knew what was in each car by its advertising and would break into them to steal the contents.
Any car in interchange service can effectively be seen anywhere in the country. We have BNSF and CSX cars on NS trains here all the time. Occassionally BNSF locos will be pulling trains through here on the NY state NS lines due to trackage rights or leasing, and BNSF is not really an east coast runner at all.
Railroads have their own RR cars of course, so a long NS train around here can be pulling mostly NS RR cars, but others can appear too, like CSX most commonly and some BNSF parts.
One final food for thought is that RR cars can have a useful life of 20 to {used to be} 40 years of inservice duty. THerefore a woo