Group, In doing a little inventory control I discovered two factory "as
built" painted, fully built kits, tricked out with wire grabs, rodding and
piping,
of Intermountain NP reefers #91160 and #91186. These kits are clones to the
PFE R-40-23 cars and were manufactured by IM probably ten years ago.
Anyway, I
was a happy camper until I pulled out my prototype research material to check
them for accuracy by today standards. Wrong brake wheel and roofwalk, no big
deal until I read Ed Hawkins' RJ article of September 2000. The factory
decorated cars have black ends and roofs. Ed's article says the ends
should be
freight car red, and the roof aluminum color, with maybe car cement on the
seam
caps. Ed, you state that this was your best effort research, so can anyone
else
support the red and aluminum colors----OR disagree before two really nice
models head for eBay.
Paul Lyons
Laguna Niguel, CA

Paul, I have both builders and in-service photos of these cars. There has
always been some confusion about them because there were two series,
91000-91249 built in late 1947 and 91250-91499 built in mid-1949. Both
were built directly off the PFE drawings by Pacific Car & Foundry 9with
PFE's permission), but the second series were clones of the PFE R-40-25
class and had diagonal-panel roofs.
The information I have, from NP sources I trust, is that the 9100-91249
series cars were delivered with black roof and ends; the roofs were
aluminum only on the later 91250-91499 series cars. And though the photos I
have are B/W, they rather strongly confirm this. Both series were later
repainted with mineral red roofs and ends. When the earliest cars in the
91000-91249 series were delivered, they were not stenciled with "Main
Street of the Northwest" slogans under the heralds. I'm not sure when the
slogans started to be added, but I have a photo of NP 91000, the class car,
without the slogans and of NP 91072 with them, so they must have been
applied fairly early in the production run and certainly would have been on
the cars your models are numbered for.

The photos I have show three different cars with widely separated numbers
in the 91000-91249 series and all have Ajax hand brakes and Morton running
boards, so I think it can be inferred that all cars in the series had the
same equipment (which is what's on my IM model of NP 91123). If I were
you, I wouldn't part with those models.

Richard H. Hendrickson
Ashland, Oregon 97520