In the course of working on my chapter about the ex-PRR R7 reefers I am seeing things I had not noticed before. I have 14 photos of these cars in FGE or NX reporting marks configured as "RS" types. Five of the photos are from 1935 to 1940 (by reweigh dates) and none of them have been rebuilt with the Hutchins roofs. The remaining 9 photos date from 1945 to 1951 (by reweigh dates) and only 3 of these photos have the Hutchins roof. I have to admit this surprises me. I was also surprised to notice that the cars in eleven of the photos had only one long grab iron on the left end of the side, while 2 had a pair of 18-inch grabs and one had one 18-inch and one long (23-24-inch) grab iron. None of the cars before 1945 had two grab irons.

A quick way to tell if it is a Hutchins roof, aside from the 12 fairly prominent roof ribs, is the presence of the trademark hatch rests that always accompanied the Hutchins roof. A reminder if you are building one of these w/the Hutchins roof, you will need to remove the rib in the center of each flat roof panel and sand it down. This goes pretty quickly.

Happy modeling!

Bill Welch