I am currently acquiring material, equipment, and all that is necessary to get my first layout (N) going. What troubles me somewhat is that the line I want is the Vermont Central but I find very little with this designation. I suppose that one solution is to buy unlettered stock and add my own lettering. What is the general approach to keeping line consistency? Some stock can be had unlettered but that does not seem to be as common as one would think.
Thanks,
Fran
There are short lines which never owned a single piece of revenue freight rolling stock. The only things lettered for the home road were locomotives, MW cars, cabooses and, if they ran passenger service, passenger cars. When needed for outbound loads they would contact the connecting railroad for suitable empties. Inbound loads came in foreign road cars, and those were frequently ‘captured’ and loaded with outbound freight.
If you model a railroad which operated in that manner, the cars you run can be lettered for a wide variety of railroads. Mostly they will be ‘home road’ cars from the railroads where the loads originated. In Vermont in the Transiion era, I would expect to see a lot of B&M, B&A(NYC), New Haven and Pennsy cars, plus coal hoppers from the Northeast Pennsylvania anthracite country. UP, SP and ATSF cars might occasionally show up - once a year or so.
Even if your railroad ran its own fleet of freight cars, at least half the cars on line would probably be ‘foreign’ - cars from other railroads. Only vast systems like the NYC and PRR could run a sizeable percentage of their freight from origin to destination on home rails.
My situation is the exact opposite. My prototype was a national monopoly - the only game in town. The cars have reporting marks that identify type and capacity, but railroad identification consists of Kanji characters less than a millimeter high - on the car frame, nowhere near the number.
Chuck (Modeling Central Japan in September, 1964)
Most smaller railroads have few if any locomotives or cars lettered for them. Even many of the larger roads are spotty.
The most popular roads such as PRR, Santa Fe, NYC, SP, UP have the most. HO has the most selection due to it’s huge popularity. Other scales less so.
Lettering your own is what you’ll have to do. As you have found, painted/unlettered models can be hard to find. You may be able to remove just the lettering from a model and reletter it. Otherwise, you’ll have to strip and repaint.
Enjoy
Paul
For some happy news there are CV cars availabile in N Scale but,one needs to look around for them starting with E-bay and N Scale yard sale…Look at your favorite hobby shop and train shows.
Welcome to the forums.
What era are you modeling? I have some CV rolling stock in HO, but I don’t know of the availability of it in N. Since the CV was owned by Canadian National, there was a lot of CN equipment on the CV rails. For more modern times, I think my LHS has New England Central locos, but I have seen few freight cars. Of course in any era rail cars move from one section of the country to another, so most any freight car can appear in any area.
Have you tried searching the various online sellers and manufacturer web sites to see if they are producing or have produced any. I was looking through one site and found two hoppers I didn’t know existed.
Where are you located?