I am finding that like the prototype my railroad has more covered hoppers in operation than box cars. Anybody else discover this?
Nope, I have more boxcars than hoppers and only a few covered hoppers because most do not fit my era - i.e. they are slightly early. I’m more into coal drags so most of my hoppers are open to the elements.
I also have a decent quantity of tank cars, gondolas, and reefers plus a smattering of stock cars and a couple of flat cars. That gives my freight fleet some nice variety.
The only exception to the above is when the 20th Century Limited or the Aerotrain comes roaring through. I have a 10-car and a 9-car consist for each, respectively.
Tom
My layout is present day
Containers (intermodal) pretty much drove out the boxcar. Bulk stuff is now carried in covered hoppers or open hopper, ore cars or gondolas. Even flatcars aren’t used as much in current railroading as in the past.
Up here at least we have unit trains of covered hoppers and others of intermodal double stack well cars. Tank trains full of crude oil or sulfur and coal trains of open hoppers with rotating couplers.
Mixed trains are usually consisted of dead heading empties.
I model modern era and have more box cars than covered hoppers or tank cars. I do have quite a few gondolas to carry steel coils. I also have intermodal cars as well as a handful of auto rack cars…
It’s your railroad, so run what you want!
Neal
It really depends on where and especially when.
I freelance so not one of the things I lose sleep over.
Does having more covered hoppers than boxcars reflect the types of industry(ies) on the layout? Mine has a mixed variety b/c model the 1980s in SW VA. The state strongly favors coal cars, so many open hoppers. Of course I have other types of cars to reflect the types of industries found that that location and timeframe.
The Fleet Of Nonsense is more than 50% boxcars, just because all of the neat custom decal sets I have collected look best on boxcars.
I only have three plastic covered hoppers.
This one is my favorite, a Kadee PS-2 with Detail Associates square roof hatches.
Most of the rest of the covered hoppers are brass models.
This one was built from a Funaro And Camerlengo resin kit. It is a “Carbon Black” covered hopper, again modified with Detail Associates square roof hatches.
Building 40 foot boxcars from plastic kits is quicker and much less expensive.
-Kevin
CSX through Tennessee has more covered hoppers
Late Transition Era, upper Midwest for me, using the Milwaukee as a prototype. I’ve been building up my fleet with Milwaukee boxcars. I also like cars that match my industries. I have a brewery and an icing platform, so ice bunker reefers fit in. I’m 74 now, but as a teenager I got a number of tankers, so I have those, plus a bunch of open coal hoppers.
I bought and built a tannery complex a few years back, so I added a couple of Hides Only old boxcars, an acid tanker and my only covered hopper for salt. I’ve also got grain boxcars for a baking company and a few meat reefers for a slaughterhouse. The scrapyard feeds a few scrap metal gondolas.
Most of the boxcars are just along for the ride, but can be used for shipping at a number at industries. I think having a number of freight cars which are keyed to particular industries works well.
More covered hoppers than boxcars. Yes, it is possible in current day railroading, depending upon where you are located.
I could not help but notice in the SD40-2 survivors dvd series that it seems the majority of freight cars in service, at least in areas where SD40-2’s were surviving in mainline service after 2015, were indeed covered hoppers.
That is also why I recently loaded up on ScaleTrains covered hoppers and the Tangent 4750 cf covered hoppers.
I noticed in one of the BNSF Motive Power Annuals some years back that their roster of standard, not-specialty equipped boxcars was stated as being down to zero. Sure they had once acquired a bunch of former Railbox cars etc. but the standard 50’ jack of all trades boxcars are gone from some roads. There are undoubtedly reasons for this, one of which being that the TTX and former Railbox fleets of go anywhere anytime cars are still in existence, so when a standard boxcar might be needed, just get one of those…
John Teichmoller put it this way for non-Pennsy modelers, “You probably have too many PRR (and other foreign road) hoppers unless their owner interchanged with your line and not enough PRR boxcars”.
You weren’t likely to see a SP hopper in New Jersey or Connecticut (why do you think they built the Poughkeepsie Bridge?) more than a couple of times, if that, in a lifetime - not with all that good Pennsylvania and West Virginia bituminous next door.
See http://prr.railfan.net/freight/classpage.html?class=X29 for the data on one class of PRR boxcars - about 28,000 units (more than most lines had total cars of all types) in 1944.
PRR’s wooden XL class boxcars topped out at around 37,000, what is almost assuredly the record in the Western Hemisphere and probably the world (how many cars of one design did Russia and Germany build in Worl War 2?). The X-29’s mainly replaced them year by year 1924-1934, but the end came when the Pennsy ordered 10,000 new cars in 1936 and scrapped most of its wood cars (some went to MOW service). Accordingly to the November 1936 National Geographic, the flames at the Lucknow, PA scrapping plant (just north of Harrisburg) could be seen for miles as the wooden cars were burned to recover their metal components. In those wide and spacious days, you didn’t have to worry about OSHA and the EPA.
The main cars I have are Boxcars, Covered Hoppers, and Hoppers.
My Conrail has more coal hoppers than I was expecting. I have enough to model at least 3 trains. I’m still missing Bethgon Coalporters that they rebuild from old hoppers.
Although I model multi-eras I try to stay within my actual timeline in the 1990s but I do travel into 2006.
Freight cars I’m still missing are Auto Racks, Bulk end flatcars, refrigerator cars, Centerbeams, Tank cars, Auto Parts boxcar, and Coil cars. Plus Maxi stacks and containers.
Results may vary around a picky person and N Scale modeling
Have never given such a thought to the OPs question.
I have a mix of different freight wagons to compliment the different industries on the layout.
David
If you model a specific railroad in a specific time period your best friend is an Official Railroad Equipment Register or ORER for your time period. Published quarterly the railroads just throw the old ones away. They are a 4" thick phone book that lists every car in interchange serviceby railroad, the car numbers and quantity and dimensions and type. Thus will tell you the quantity of each car is prototypical for your home road and interchange cars from connecting railroads. Many rr historical sites list their cars by decade. The info is out there for you.
Geography matters.
Farm country and coal county will produce lots of hoppers, covered or open.
In modern times, I read where paper and lumber products account for over 50% of the contents of boxcars today, and railroads are having a shortage of boxcars due to the decline of their use influencing the projected future decline (lack of new boxcar production over the years)
While the demand for print material is declining, Amazon, ebay, et AL produces demand for paper based packaging products. And paper towels, tissue paper, etc. are in demand as much as ever.
A place like southern Georgia or the SE in general, or the pacific NW, where there is not a lot of grain farming as a percentage of land but has many paper product mills, might generate many more boxcars than covered hoppers.
My shortline layout runs cement, vegetable oil, corn syrup, and paper products; so its covered hoppers, tank cars, and then box cars.
The more you learn about a RR of interest, the better you can represent it in model form.
I model 1900-1905 so covered hoppers don’t exist yet.
As with any territory the mix of cars depends on the area it serves. The classic example I give is Tower 55 in Ft Worth . A north-south route of the UP crosses an east-west route of the UP and even thugh they are the same railroad in the same location they are two completely different mixes of cars. On the N-S route there will be unit coal and grain trains and it will be heavy on tank cars. On the E-W route there will be intermodal and automotive business.
How true, also there are many types of covered hoppers, for example I have a raft of Ann Arbor 2 bay covered hoppers as the Ann Arbor shipped 20 cars of sand from Yuma, MI to the Ford Engine plant in Brookpark, OH over AA and PC/CR trackage. The D&TSL shipped many carloads of silica sand from Rockport MI, to the glass factories in Toledo in 2 bay Covered Hoppers. And many railroads shipped cement in the 2 bay Covered Hoppers/
A number of the Three Bay small (2893CF) Covered hoppers were in Potash and Soda Ash service on lots of railroads, some were also used in shipping granuals that were used to make roofing tiles.
And while most of the larger cars were used for grain, there were some that hauled plastic pellets, salt, and in the case of the GN 5250’s they hauled vermiculite from the Northwest to the Scott’s Plant in Columbus to making fertilizer and potting soil.
And while I have a number of Covered Hoppers, I am modeling the era when the IPD boxcars were just coming in and I also have a lot of the stretched 40’ to 50’ cars that were done by the railroads, along with rebuilt 40’ boxcars that were refurbished and leased out by Evans. Also since I model the DT&I Auto Parts cars in the 60’ and 96’ catergory are prevalent.
Rick Jesionowsk
As a few have already said, the type of industry being modeled dictates a lot about what type of cars one would have on their pike.
For me, a new comer, I am modeling the coal, dairy and meatpacking industries so open hoppers, reefers and cattle cars are more in my lineup than covered hoppers.
charles