On Aug 3, 2007, at 3:52 AM, Gatwood, Elden J SAD wrote:

Mont;

I have also heard the second half of the story on the Gould tank car,
and
there are some that swear that there was a car in SoCal "back when"
that was
used to verify measurements off the USRA car plans; either way, we
will never
know for sure, something I have learned over many years of watching
real
railroading and finding photos that proved my assumptions incorrect
over, and
over, and over....

Not sure where you heard this tale, Elden, but it's simply not true; no
such car existed. The reason Gould chose to model the USRA design is
that his molding machines would not handle a one piece tank, or even
the separate pieces of a three course tank, but were adequate for the
separate pieces of a four course tank. When he found the excellent,
highly detailed drawings of the USRA tank car in the 1919 Car Builders'
Dictionary, he thought it was just the thing, and it never occurred to
him that such elaborate drawings would have been prepared for a car
that was never built. Unfortunately, he was egged on in this project
by a certain magazine editor/publisher who considered himself the
ultimate authority on prototype modeling and who could have done (but
didn't) the relatively simple research required to discover the truth.
Worse, when the model appeared and several of us (myself included)
pointed out that there was no prototype for it, said editor wrote a
supercilious editorial claiming that we were a bunch of amateurs who
didn't know what we were talking about.

Richard Hendrickson