It would be nice if this topic would get integrated into the mainstream Model Railroad Hobby.....

Having been in both the manufacturing and distribution end of the Industry, there is WAY too much sales regionalism in
roadnames.... (and I'm not even going to broach the tendency for people to buy the colorful and unusual over what
they really "need" to represent the prototype on their railroads!!).

While we might overbuy our favorite prototype road, those of us that have fictional home roads probably underpopulate
our railroads with cars for it due to the task of decaling or having custom runs done.

It is interesting to think about the distribution of roadnames and car types on a particular stretch of modeled railroad....
and to figure out how that should impact how the cars are waybilled. I don't think schemes that purely randomize the
car assignment by type without regard to owner duplicate the prototype. The car accounting rules and interchange
conventions between roads forced patterns that flavored the consists of individual trains.

Maybe Ted could think about this as a sidebar to his "Essential Freight Cars" series to provide the answer to the unwashed
as to WHY a Soo Line or Pennsy car is essential, even though a person models ATSF or B&M, etc..... I think MR had a
piece that opened the subject of car interchange rules and the accounting that was supposed to drive utilization of the fleet...
but perhaps more needs to be said on the subject, both for the general modeling public and as a handy authoritative reference for
more sophisticated students of freight cars....

Charlie Vlk

It