I've been looking for this 1930 film for quite some time, as it's been discussed on this list and
others as a terrific railroad film. Tonight, I got a link to www.archive.org and it is one of the
films that is available there, free, no less. I'm probably one of the last to find out about this
site, but it looks like there is a great deal of historical ore to be mined there. Undoubtedly
freight car information.

There are freight cars in Danger Lights.

SGL

Don,
You need Tony Thompson's PFE book and that'll answer all the questions
you'll ever have (even has paint chips). The Athearn car is indeed
based on the PFE R-40-23. He also had an extensive series about all
the PFE cars in RMC (not MR). You'll want the February 1987 RMC issue
focusing on PFE steel reefers which has info on the Athearn cars
specifically. Also you may want the January, March and April 1987
issues for info on PFE wood cars, rebuilds and operations/express
cars. Hope that helps some. BTW Tony is also on this list and only
growls at you sometimes if you ask him a specific question;-)
cheers
Stefan Lerche'
Duncan, BC

--- In STMFC@..., Don Worthy <don_worthy@...> wrote:

Thank you, both. Do either of you know what years the articles about

these cars would be in? I've got years of MRs in box after box. I'm
thinking these articles had the paint information and other good stuff
in them.

I need to findout what the correct paint scheme would be for them

for their "as delivered" paint. My area cut-off point is 1953.

I sure do appreciate your help!
Don Worthy

"Miller, Andrew S." <asmiller@...> wrote:
Don,

AFAIK it's a model of a PFE R40-23. It's a good stand-in, being
dimensionally correct with appropriate details. But it is ancient
molding technology and far better models are available now from I/M,
unfortunately, not as kits.

I have several of the old Athearn models in my fleet and repainted them
all PFE once I learned what they were intended to be. They were, and
are, offered by Athearn in many road names - few of which were correct.
The most egregious mispainting would probably be SFRD, since the Santa
Fe cars were always very distinctive (5 foot doors, "reverse" hinged
hatches, etc).


regards,

Andy Miller

-----Original Message-----
From: STMFC@... [mailto:STMFC@...] On Behalf Of
Don Worthy
Sent: Thursday, May 04, 2006 6:10 PM
To: STMFC@...
Subject: [STMFC] old Athearn 40ft steelside reefer HOscale

group, could someone tell me what the proto-type was for the old
Athearn steelside 40ft reefer?
I remember, years ago, there were articles in MR or MRC for modifying
them into other types and classes. Now that I'd like to find them, I
can't.
I've got several over the years and many I've reworked the roof
hatches, underframes and brake gear. I don't want to trash them or keep

them in boxes.
Would someone help jog my memory?
Thanks
Don Worthy








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and save big.

With so much knowledge and interest on this list, what if individuals
took responsibility for short summary of the railroad(s) that they know
about. Upload to the shared files folder. Let other people look and
update as required.

Subject: Re: Paint scheme index

Fred's got it right. The fanciest it should get is a line with a
date characterizing the new scheme
adopted then, and a "typical" photo so that one can "get it" with
respect to what the characterization means.

This wouldn't be HARD, exactly, but time consuming, yes.

Ted Larson

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
http://mail.yahoo.com

--- cf5250 <timboconnor@...> wrote:

because no
hardware or software will exist for them. Heaven
only knows
what mass storage will look like 50 years from now.

Yes, this is what I alluded to by saying plan to copy
every 5 years AND plan to update/convert files to
newer formats. Oh, and scan at the highest resolution
possible!

This topic keeps coming up and I don't want to
belabor it,
but I've said it before: the best archival storage
available
now and for the future is a hard disk.

Actually, as you'll note in the article I mentioned in
my earlier post, it's actually tape that is generally
recommended. Less chance of mechanical failure. We
back up all our gold masters to tape. An alternate
that might prove reliable are the CF cards or memory
sticks that are now prevalent and cheap, and
plug-and-play.

Enough on this before I get thrown into moderator
jail!

Dave Eggleston

__________________________________________________
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Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
http://mail.yahoo.com

Thank you, both. Do either of you know what years the articles about these cars would be in? I've got years of MRs in box after box. I'm thinking these articles had the paint information and other good stuff in them.
I need to findout what the correct paint scheme would be for them for their "as delivered" paint. My area cut-off point is 1953.
I sure do appreciate your help!
Don Worthy

"Miller, Andrew S." <asmiller@...> wrote:
Don,

AFAIK it's a model of a PFE R40-23. It's a good stand-in, being
dimensionally correct with appropriate details. But it is ancient
molding technology and far better models are available now from I/M,
unfortunately, not as kits.

I have several of the old Athearn models in my fleet and repainted them
all PFE once I learned what they were intended to be. They were, and
are, offered by Athearn in many road names - few of which were correct.
The most egregious mispainting would probably be SFRD, since the Santa
Fe cars were always very distinctive (5 foot doors, "reverse" hinged
hatches, etc).


regards,

Andy Miller

Don,

AFAIK it's a model of a PFE R40-23. It's a good stand-in, being
dimensionally correct with appropriate details. But it is ancient
molding technology and far better models are available now from I/M,
unfortunately, not as kits.

I have several of the old Athearn models in my fleet and repainted them
all PFE once I learned what they were intended to be. They were, and
are, offered by Athearn in many road names - few of which were correct.
The most egregious mispainting would probably be SFRD, since the Santa
Fe cars were always very distinctive (5 foot doors, "reverse" hinged
hatches, etc).


regards,

Andy Miller

Numbered page '16' is in my download -- as the seventeenth (page 12 throws off the number sequence) of thirty-five pages.

Storey Lindsay
Celje, Slovenia

Greetings All,

Another consideration for keeping files sharp is the way they
are stored. A pile of files in a drawer will dull every time
they rub against each other as you open your toolbox. Files
should be kept in a vinyl sleeve, or wrapped in paper, when not
in use. Some claim a bit of stick chalk in the teeth will
prevent soft metals from clogging them. Keep the teeth clean
with a file card (a stiff flat metal brush).

Michael

Anyone missing page 16 should send an email to bierglaeser at yahoo dot
com. I will send the missing page as a jpeg attachment. It turns out
that I have that page albeit missing some verbiage that I will include
in the text of the email.
Gene Green

Train Shed Cyc #3 (1931) and #61 (1925) show both cars.

The RI cars are ventilated with tiny (3" dia.) vents high on each end and
roof vents (illustrated on page 157 of the 1925 CBC).

The RI and PFE cars are of very similar construction with two readily
visible differences. The RI cars are 11'-10" height to eaves while the PFE
cars are 12'-4" height to eaves. The siding on the RI car extends down to
the bottom of the side sills while the PFE siding only extends down to four
inches above the bottom of the side sills. The cyc drawings show Bettendorf
underframes for both.

The Bettendorf underframe uses an H-beam with part of the web removed. The
bottom flange is then bent to close the gap. The draft gear-centerplate
casting is riveted to the upper and lower parts of the web, holding it all
together. Additional plates are riveted to both parts of the web inside the
truck centers for additional strength.

Doug Brown

On May 4, 2006, at 2:24 PM, Justin Kahn wrote:

I can't claim much expertise on the GN (or perhaps, given the knowledge base
on this list, even much else), but I have some recollection of having read
that the GN cars also had a steel channel center sill, so were not dependent
solely on truss rods.

Jace is correct. Though many of the GN TR box cars were originallybuilt with wood center sills, all were converted to steel draft sills in order to conform with the ARA ruling that outlawed wood underframes after 1928. Note, though, that the draft sills were shallow and provided little vertical support for the car body; their main function was to transmit pulling and buffing forces from one draft gear box to the other. So the truss rods still provided most of the structural support for the center of the car body.

Richard Hendrickson

On another subject, how do you folks who seem to have so much
data readily at your fingertips organize your "stuff?"

Jerry, personally many years ago I started entering items
into simple text files on my PC. I have hundreds of them,
one each for most major railroads and many dozens of special
files based on car types, lists of various kinds, models,
etc.

In addition for years before the Yahoo (and predecessor) lists
there were many mailing lists, which I archived (they were on
work computers) and transferred to my PC. (I'm on my third PC
now.) Those mail messages totalled around 19,000 and each one
is saved as a text file now.

Also I am a longtime Eudora (mail program) user, so I have over
100,000 saved mail messages going back over 10 years -- these
are stored in Eudora format, and are only accessible with Eudora.
(Which is free from Qualcomm, by the way.)

For searching and creating text files I am a longtime user of
Emacs and Unix-style utilities like grep (a pattern matcher),
so searching hundreds of text files for a matching string can
take just a few seconds. When someone posts something I want
to record (whether email or from the web) nowadays I simply cut
and paste it into one of my text files. (For example, freight
car roster information that I want to remember.)

Nowadays, there are more powerful search organizers like the
Google desktop tools, which basically turn your PC into a private
Google search space. As everyone realized at the outset of the
"internet explosion", SEARCH was the true killer app -- something
without which the internet could not function.

So whatever your method of storage, make sure that it is amenable
to SEARCH programs. The Google desktop tool can read spreadsheets,
PDF files, WORD documents, and numerous other formats including
Microsoft mail. (But sadly for me, not Eudora.)

Most of my Yahoogroups subscriptions now send mail to my GMAIL
(Google) account. I simply archive everything I receive, which
enters them into my own search space. This is about 50x faster
and more useful than the Yahoogroups search, which is tedious to
use. I have about 40+ group subscriptions going to GMAIL daily!

I have dropped many of my magazine subscriptions as a result of
this glut of information. I also cut back on historical societies
since so much of the specialized information I wanted is now
available online, or from email groups. But at the same time,
I contribute $$ to Fallen Flags and the RPI web site, so I am
probably spending the same amount but it's just going somewhere
else. I wish that Model Railroader and the other mags would go
fully electronic -- I would be much happier paying for PDF's of
the magazines and be able to stop filling up shelves with them.

In forty years a wristwatch will contain 100 terabytes of storage
and will hold all of the information any modeler would ever
need, including a million photos, copies of every ORER since
the beginning of time, and it will be able to communicate with
any visualization device I happen to be using at the time so I
can read, hear, search and view anything whenever I want to,
wherever I happen to be! :-) And it will cost only 10 cents.

Tim O'Connor

Dave Eggleston wrote

My advice remains to plan to make copies every 5 years.

I will make a bet: CD's as they exist now, will be totally
unreadable in 100 years, much less 300. That's because no
hardware or software will exist for them. Heaven only knows
what mass storage will look like 50 years from now.

This topic keeps coming up and I don't want to belabor it,
but I've said it before: the best archival storage available
now and for the future is a hard disk. Why? Because the cost
per GB is competitive with CD-ROM and DVD, it is far more
compact (no shelf storage problems), it's available all of
the time, and the cost per GB trend is sharply downwards,
about 50% per year. Admittedly, I am excluding storage of
say, 100 MB super-high res scans of photos. But a 160 GB
drive holds about 40,000 4 MB scan files which are of a
sufficient size for printing high quality images on paper,
if needed. And if you use a USB or Firewire hard drive, it
is completely portable and transportable and works with any
PC or Mac made in the last 10 years.

When you shop for hard drives, always look at the MTBF
(mean time between failure) specification. Lower speed
devices (5400RPM) often have dramatically higher MTBF than
high speed devices (up to 15000RPM). You can additionally
reduce risk by buying RAID-1 consumer devices, or doing
your own periodic backups to a secondary device.

The only CHORE in this scheme is that every 5-10 years when
you replace your PC or Mac (necessary because companies will
ALWAYS continue to discontinue support for old hardware and
software) you have to copy your files (en masse) to the new
hard drive -- about 5 minutes of effort!

And I am not dismissing paper, negatives, slides etc either.
I'm just talking about preservation of digital information.
I've heard folks saying that slides and prints degrade, and
I have certainly noticed this in my own collection lately,
especially anything in color.

Tim O'Connor

group, could someone tell me what the proto-type was for the old
Athearn steelside 40ft reefer?
I remember, years ago, there were articles in MR or MRC for modifying
them into other types and classes. Now that I'd like to find them, I
can't.
I've got several over the years and many I've reworked the roof
hatches, underframes and brake gear. I don't want to trash them or keep
them in boxes.
Would someone help jog my memory?
Thanks
Don Worthy

Keith Jordan wrote: "I've not compared to the same color [MEC Harvest Gold]
in Polly Scale, though. I wonder how it compares?"

Pretty close, Keith ­ close enough for jazz, as we say in my home town.

Andy

Andy Sperandeo
Executive Editor
Model Railroader magazine
asperandeo@...
262-796-8776, ext. 461
FAX 262-796-11142

I can't claim much expertise on the GN (or perhaps, given the knowledge base on this list, even much else), but I have some recollection of having read that the GN cars also had a steel channel center sill, so were not dependent solely on truss rods. I also seem to remember that they were largely used for cement lading (in bags).
Not to push the moderators, but the list of class I roads with narrow gage subsidiaries has been fairly complete, with two exceptions, so far as I can tell: the C&NW Fenimore (WI) branch and the CB&Q three-foot lines in the Black Hills (pure CB&Q, nothing to do with C&S).

Jace Kahn, General Manager
Ceres and Canisteo RR Co.

_________________________________________________________________
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Maybe when making the file they made a mistake and miss numbered page
16 as 17 and so on. I do not have 16 either.
Thank you
Larry Jackman
ljack70117@...

As I recall, Bill McClung was considering issuing the O scale kits in RI lettering, as the prototypes were quite close, and an obvious concern is to find acceptable alternatives to utilize existing (and expensive) tooling. So far as I know, nothing came of the idea, which is too bad, as I would have bought a couple.
Ed is right about the CBC content (and TSC reprint), which I believe was the starting point for a scratch-built car article in MRR back in the 1950's (by Al Kamm, if memory serves). If Bill never does produce an O scale version, that is a ways down my list of projects.

Jace Kahn, General Manager
Ceres and Canisteo RR Co.

I seems like these cars were discussed, at some point in the distant past. Someone with better searching techniques in the STMFC archives will probably point out where.

These cars were the subject of an old wood "craftsman" kit first from Prototype Modeler and then from Taurus. The decals came, I believe, from Microscale. Perhaps they can still reproduce the set as a Mini-Cal. There will also a similar set from Walthers in the dark ages, not as "correct" as the ones from the kit.

Today, the Red Caboose R-30-12 kit could make a decent starting point for a kitbash.

As best as we can tell, the cars had yellow sides and brown ends. I don't have the Mainline Modeler issue, so I can't be sure exactly what information is there.

As I recall the story, the RI sold their refrigerator fleet back(both freight and express) to General American during the depression. The cars kept their RI numbers, but change reporting marks to GARX. I have a Hopkins photo of one in Washington DC in the 40's.

A few of these wanderers actually came home to the RI in the 50's, being purchased for ice service. If you want some more details on this, contact me off list, and I will look up the details.

Steve Hile

My recollection is that drawings and builders photos of the Rock
Island reefers offered by Prototype Modeler appeared in the 1931 CBC
and Trainshed reprints.

The drawings are so close to the PFE cars that I wouldn't be surprised
if the kit wasn't the same.

Ed Mines

Rob, last year I sent a couple of photos to Bill McClung and suggested
that he do the 1930s/'40s Rock Island lettering on the Red Caboose
model, but he didn't "bite." maybe if you nudged him about it, he'd do
a factory painted and lettered run of RI cars, especially if other list
subscribers indicated an interest in buying one or two.

Richard Hendrickson

I've always wanted to letter a steel PFE car for Rock Island,
which could be passed off as a "test car" to annoy those who know the
history: the RI tried to interest PFE in letting them "into the tent"
in the 1950s (the story is in the PFE book, page 26). The letters of
objection from UP, preserved in the UP President's Office
correspondence microfilms at the UP Museum, were blistering.
One of the RI letters even expressed a willingness to purchase
up to 1000 new steel reefers (where they would have gotten the money
isn't clear, but PFE would doubtless have made them a deal like they
had with WP, in which they made money while passing on part of the
revenue). Amongst all the correspondence is an internal PFE memo saying
that PFE could set aside the 58,000 series car numbers for the RI cars
if needed. As we all know, of course, no deal ensued. But most visitors
to my layout, seeing a steel PFE reefer with 58,000 series number and
RI emblem, would probably fall for it.
My friend Ken Harrison likes to say to such people, "Did you
know that 'gullible' isn't in the dictionary?" Others might well say,
"caveat emptor."

Tony Thompson Editor, Signature Press, Berkeley, CA

Bill, are you listening? BTW, the RITS guys would lap this up, too.

Brian Ehni

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The best color match I've found for postwar SFRD is
Accupaint Maine Central Harvest Yellow, straight out
of the bottle. It is the perfect combo of yellow and
orange. PFE [Daylight] Orange is quite different.

Tim O'Connor

It should be, Tim, since that's the color that IMRC and CB&T matched their
paint/body colors to! I happened upon the color when I was doing the
research for the old CB&T cars.

I've not compared to the same color in Polly Scale, though. I wonder how it
compares?

Keith Jordan

Well I don't know, what happened with Page 16, but maybe it will lead to another major motion picture for Tom Hanks.

Or Tom Cruise?

Tom Arnold?

--

Scott Pitzer
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Sort of like a good book where the second to last page has been torn out. So, one more time, does anyone have the MISSING page 16 that they can share? Thanks in advance!