Tony,

At the risk of pointing out the obvious that everyone
already understands ... and taking an admittedly cheap
shot at your focus on all things PFE ... *W*

UNLESS you are modeling one of "those other - and often
forgotten(?) - RRs" of the West Coast that had their 'own'
reefer fleet and so need to include reporting marks such
as WFEX rather than PFE ... *VBG*

I agree that you can get into a can of worms about how
you apportion the reefer fleets if you try to include them
in their parent RRs. It's a lot easier to just use them
as a 'separate RR' in terms of any apportionment.

All,

Personally I feel that many of us are taking this search
for the proper mix of freight cars way too far. To my way
of thinking the big picture trends and generalities of what
the mix was (should be) are the important things to focus
on. I.e. that if you have a layout that is too heavily
loaded with home road cars it "looks wrong".
I will even go so far as to say that if you want to
really take it to this kind of distribution level I don't
think you can go wrong if you just "go counting" in the
pics you have available for the RR(s) you model for the
era you are modeling. There are lots of pics out there
that are of entire trains and yards that will give you a
very good ... and easily accessible ... feeling for the
mix of what cars were/were not represented on "your" RR.
Just use those numbers and you will have a fleet that is
highly representative and will look and feel "right".

If you really love the research into the mix of freight
cars - then by all means go for it ... and I ... and the
rest of us will benefit from it ===> and praise you for it.

But if you are trying to decide if you should have 1 or 2
DT&I gons on your layout because you want to represent the
"true" mix of cars ... maybe you have forgotten why you
started down that road and it would be better if you got
back to doing more modeling and less "research" ???
- Jim