1. posterid:536692
  2. More Freight Car Content in March MRH

Re: More Freight Car Content in March MRH

A&Y Dave in MD
 

1934 saw prohibition repeal, and slim window for beer billboard reefers before billboards disappeared, per Hendrickson and Kaminski. The area I model is Piedmont plateau in North Carolina, including W-S division of Southern, and A&Y, so there is fair amount of merchandise, furniture, tobacco, textiles, some oil/gas/kerosene, lots of farm-related commodities, like fertilizer, produce, farm implements, and hay, plus some gravel, ballast. There is the occasional carload of autos delivered.

A lot goes to/from Spencer yard, Norfolk, and Potomac Yard.  Once I've completed my combined spreadsheet for 9 months' of train lists, I'll be able to summarize by road name, car type, and contents to see patterns.  I can then show how time and region can matter in terms of what is typical. I hope to write an article blending Tony's and John Nehrich's articles.  Of corse I'm not the modeler that Tony, John, or Richard are (was 😥).  So I may ask list members to contribute photos of models and prototypes I've identified as illustrations.

A doable project, inspired by Tony's example and our shared ambitions and fueled by our different interests.

Dave

Sent from Dave Bott's iPad

On Mar 4, 2015, at 10:29 AM, edb8391@... [STMFC] <STMFC@...> wrote:

 

David noted:


1934 is an interesting date to model. Almost nothing had been built in the few years previous, so the freight car fleet was almost entirely cars built 1900-1930 or so. . . . .

Quite a few freight cars were built to new designs that attempted a degree of standardization during USRA years of WW I and the following decade.  However US production dropped seriously from the stock market collapse and the following Great Depression which hit very hard by 1930.

Not much of a market for scrap metal through the 1930s as production was 'way down. The economy picked up a little by 1936/7 but sank again, until the US entered WW II.

These steel and steel framed cars built from 1918 and well into the 1920s were still reasonably new equipment by 1934, averaging 10-15 years  in age. Many would see service through WW II and into the 1950s.

Ed Bommer
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