I just ordered a BLI Paragon II NYC J1e 4-6-4 and I want a set of passenger cars to go with it. MB Klein has a sale on 3 different Branchline kits. I was wondering which cars will work. And are the kits difficult to build. I assume they are already painted models.
(Last one is assembled already)
Thanks in advance…
You want a baggage car or two at the head end. Then you want some day coaches, perhaps a diner, in addition to the sleepers. Heavy weight passenger trains seldom had a consist of matching cars. The coaches, baggage car and diner would usually be from the home road (NYC in your case), but the sleepers could be Pullman, or PRR, or any connecting road. Once loaded with sleeping passengers, the railroads would pass sleepers along from one road to another. A sleeper might start out in New England or Canada, be passed along to the NYC who in turn might pass the car along to any connecting road.
One baggage car might be home road, but the train might well pull a RailWay Express car or baggage cars from connecting roads. Baggage cars handled express packages, parcel post, newspapers, all sorts of less than carload lot freight. The railroad might make as much revenue from the baggage cars as the sleepers.
So I assume the 6 axle cars shown in the ad above will work?
Depends on when you’re layout is set. The heavyweight car in your pic shows a 1910’s-20’s car as it would have appeared in the fifties. Before 1938 all New York Central cars were painted Pullman green to match the Pullman cars they and other railroads used. In 1938 NYC streamlined their premier train, the 20th Century Limited, with lightweight smooth-side cars wearing the same colors as the car in your pic, only reversed - light gray body with dark gray window band. Their early passenger diesels (E7’s) were delivered in 1945 to match, but they reversed the colors and started repainting things around 1950.
Second, it depends on what train you’re modelling. The Twentieth Century when it was pulled by steam was an all-first class, all-Pullman train. Only the NYC dining car broke up the all-Pullman consist - even the combination baggage-smoker car at the head of the train was a Pullman car. Generally the combine was all that was needed for baggage, sine the Century generally didn’t haul mail or express. After WW2 the Hudsons worked their way down the list of NYC trains, ending up in their last years pulling local trains and even some freights.
BTW a similar topic / question was asked recently, you might find some of those comments usefull, especially if you’re modelling a pre-war 20th century…
http://cs.trains.com/trccs/forums/p/161301/1776855.aspx#1776855
What radius curves will you be running this on? Whenever you’re looking at passenger cars, that’s got to be an important consideration. Many of the longer cars won’t even work on 22-inch radius, and certainly not on 18.
I have an older BLI Hudson, by the way, and it handles 18-inch curves OK. The drawbar between the engine and tender on mine has two settings, and I have to use the wider separation to get it around the curves.
Absolutely. The heavy weight monitor roof (or clearstory roof some call it) were the typical passenger car and they lasted right up to Amtrak times. Every whistle stop in American used to have daily passenger service. The sleek streamliners we model so frequently were actually rather rare. For every streamliner there were hundreds of just plain trains, heavy weight coaches behind steam and later diesel power, coming and going to every little, medium and big burg in the land. Although steamers did pull some streamliners before WWII, they pulled a lot more just plain trains. As diesels came in after the war, the named streamliners got them first and the steamers were assigned to the just plain trains.
Among passengers there was a belief that 6 axle cars rode better and were classier than four axle cars.
The streamlined lightweight cars really didn’t need three-axle trucks because they were so much lighter. The old heavyweight cars really were heavy - the builders often poured concrete into the car’s lower areas as a sub-floor to add weight and stability to the car.
NYC had heavyweight cars, smooth-sided streamlined cars, and fluted-side stainless steel passenger cars. I’ve seen pics / film of Hudsons pulling all three types.