I was muttering around in the work shop this afternoon and came across a box of 8 Rivarossi/AHM/IHC PRR heavy weight passenger cars that I purchased at our NMRA chapter meeting. Not that there is anything wrong with them but I have since purchased some other PRR Heavy weights that I like much better so I figure what the heck thin out the herd and put them up for sale and use the proceeds to put towards maybe one of those BLI Baldwin centipede’s So I am writing up the add and of course going by the box numbers and descriptions and so when I go to put in the road number I see coach #1 is 3940 I pick up coach #2 and you guessed it 3940…lol all four coaches have the same road number. Now I know this is not prototypical/correct but my question to you is. How important are things like road numbers and recoding marks etc. to you? Is it worth changing the numbers on the other 3 or would something like this bother you or maybe keep you form buying it.
Guess the bottom line is I should have checked them out more closely but didn’t think something like that was really necessary when buying from another member but hey my bad.
The main thing it comes down to for me is this: Can I operate the railroad realistically with duplicate roadnumbers?
On my old N scale layout, each car was switched during an operating session, thanks to the car-cards and waybills. Passenger cars just ran in a single block. Thus, I wouldn’t have minded as much if the passenger cars had duplicate road numbers, as it wasn’t as essential to operations. But I probably would have changed them anyway, just for completeness & realism.
In my operating scheme, not only does each car have its own, unique, number, but the numbers are ones I personally copied off prototype rolling stock in Japan in the early/mid 1960s.
In this case, where the factory only applied a single road number, if my object was to ‘thin the herd,’ I would sell them as-is. You might get four different buyers, or you might sell them to someone who wants to give them specific numbers to fit HIS scheme. Either way, renumbering them before sale wouldn’t really be an improvement.
I would simply specify, “Original factory finish,” and let the buyer deal with it.
IDeally: (pun not intended) My cars will have separate numbers. Mostly, so it’s easier on me which “Car 53” is in need of help.
Realistically: I don’t have the proper decals to renumber them, or the time, or the confidence to be able to undo without buggering up the rest fo the car. So the same they’ll stay for a while. What cars I run at the club, I run them as set trains. And I’ve found I favor an Ops session where one pulls by car types not car numbers for ease of set-up, so it doesn’t bother me too bad.
Road numbers, especially on my locomotives, are quite…no, very important. I won’t have duplicates unless I know one is yearning for that great scrapyard in the sky and I would like to replace it. So far, nothing like that situation has happened, although my Y6b #2200 came darned close just prior to Christmas. [V]
I would be less finicky about cars, especially freight.
True confessions here. It would drive me nuts to have two cars OR locomotives running with the same road number. Maybe it was something in my childhood.
Whatever the case, one skill I’ve developed maybe better than any other is that of removing numerals (usually) without damaging the paint color. This has allowed me to put together a nice fleet of MDC Union Pacific ore cars, each individually numbered. I sleep better now.
I will answer this way. I have purchased and placed on the layout, a total of 89 of the ExactRail ATSF grain cars. They only had 4 or 6 numbers to start with. So I had the thrill of changing the numbers on 80 or more of these cars.
No dupe numbers are very important for my computer based car inventory and for waybill routing.
Well for me right now it’s not a priority, actually the wife was down here in the train room and I was telling her about my numbering dilemma and she turns and looks at he mainline just above the new yard section under construction and she’s reading off the numbers on N&W 100 ton coal hoppers and she says these numbers repeat themselves every 4th car. I said yup I figured i would change them one of these days but for $1.00/car I can live with it.(One of my better train show finds) she asked how many do you have I said 150 so there is some work ahead of me no question but I look at it as one of those jobs you do once your pretty much finished but I know how some guys have a baby if everything isn’t just the way the prototype ran it. I like the suggestion of “factory finish” thank you I think I’ll borrow that if you don’t mind.
With a small layout and a small collection/fleet of cars and engines the road number is pretty important to me. To make sure I pay attention I have a lot of similar cars that have only minor differences in details and of course in their road number. It makes me pay more attention to what car I’m moving on the layout.
In my case, specific individual ID numbers are critical for my locomotives and freight rollingstock, as I operate these in a prototypical manner through assignments arranged by loco classification/pulling power distinction and forwarding of cars by carcards.
Although my passenger cars are individually numbered, this is far less important to me since these cars tend to be used in semi-permanent consists for pre-assigned runs. Thus, I’d say that unless you are trying to represent some specific time and road, I wouldn’t be overly concerned about having identical passenger car numbers.
Road numbers are important to me, and most particularly for locos since I use them for DCC Id’s. But realistically, aside from the locos, it is a future concern since I am still coming up to speed on the layout itself.
That’s on my to-do list. But it’s way down on my to-do list.
All of my duplicate-numbered cars are old, from my teenage years. I’ve got 3 F7As, all with the same road number and all with decoders, so I have to remember which is which.
I guess the thing that keeps me from renumbering is the difficulty of matching number decals to the original car. How do you guys deal with that problem? Do you try to match the decals, and only replace a few digits? Do you just replace the whole number? Or do you renumber as a “patch” and not worry that it doesn’t match the factory paint?
If you’re doing any sort of switching or operating simulating actually moving and fowarding freight, those are very important to have distinct numbers.
If your preference is more to the run 'em in circles and enjoy watching them go end of things and you never do any switching or sorting, then it’s not important for operating, but might still be usefull for keeping track of things.
For me, it varies. On the Exactrail grain cars I mentioned, I removed partial numbers because I had several decal sheets of the same lettering font as the ExactRail cars. On other cars, I do what ever necessary, but it is good to have railroad font decal sheets handy, especially for your homeroad. I have used the patch numbering with several cars also.
Let’s put it this way. A couple years ago I made an inventory of my 200 railroad cars and found that two had the same road number. I donated the duplicate to a better cause. Besides, I was looking for reasons to thin-out my roster a bit because there were too many foreign-road cars, particularly foreign non-box cars.
I had done a better job of avoiding duplicate numbers than originally feared.
To me, they are important for operation - however I don’t as of yet have duplicate cars that will need differentiating. With a “fleet” of 10 cars, it’s not a problem yet, but when I do get a dupe, I’ll have to change it out.
For the most part I’m attempting to avoid duplicates since I’m going for operations. So far in my meager collection I have only a few dupicates: a 2 gons, a 2 hoppers, and somehow 3 BN boxcars with different color paint and the same number. The easy solution for the gons and hoppers is to have one empty and one loaded rather than try to renumber or discard the cars. The boxcars will need to be changed.
As I add to my fleet I’m making a conscious effort to avoid dupliactes but with a need for 100 plus hoppers in 3 road names there will obviously end up some dupes and yes they will need renumbered. Such is life.
Loco’s of course will need to have different numbers, not only for scheduling but for the sake of DCC addresses, this however is easier to deal with since there is no need for mass quantities of motive power.
I guess as a test you could start using them on your layout, and see how long it takes for anyone to notice. I’d bet it might take quite a while. Unless you use car cars for switching passenger cars around, who’s ever going to look at the car number as a passenger train rolls by??
But…It wouldn’t be that hard to renumber them. Remember you only have to change ONE NUMBER to give it a unique ID. Pretty easy to change the 9 to an 8 for example (3840) or the 3 to an 8 (8940). Change one zero to a 3 (3943) and you’re done. (You wouldn’t even have to remove the old number when changing a 9 or 3 to an 8.)
You can probably remove a number with an eraser and a little Solvaset…might be able to do it with an eraser by itself. Or cover one number with a little dot of PRR tuscan red and decal over it. After a little weathering, you won’t be able to notice there was a change.