Hi Mark--Sometime in 1953 PRR decided that covered hoppers should be gray. The shadow keystone drawing for the H30 was issued in April, 1955. Any H30's requiring repaint between 1953 and April 1955

I'm one of a number of folks who benefited from exchange of data with Tim Gilbert, and also miss his very carefully thought through posts. It was of some assistance in developing my understanding of

Dave: As a matter of elementary statistics, given the number of railroads whose reporting marks you are keeping an eye out for, you'd clearly have to pore over well over a thousand car records

Just a reminder a bunch of Tim's data files, and other wheel reports are saved in the files section of the group. Brian J Carlson P.E. Cheektowaga NY

I've stayed out of this discussion so far. As some of you know, I have been using Tim and Dave's "populationist" hypothesis to develop my freight cat fleet of approximately 350 boxcars, 500-600 cars

Dave Evans wrote: Nothing wrong with learning by asking, Dave. We often take a shortcut on layouts by not giving real routings "beyond the layout," since many operators don't care and in any

Tony, Thank-you for the education - I didn't realize the shipper could specify the entire route - my exposure in this area has been limited to car cards - which typically have just destination, and

Chet, Thanks! I have not compiled 1955 fleet data, but if percentages are similar to 1943, then the data in msg 23571 deviates from national averages by factors of 2 or 3. NKP is several times more

Dan Holbrook wrote: You are right, and I should not have implied that yardmasters themselves assigned any cars. I was thinking (obviously less clearly that I should) that yardmasters would have

Tim, Thanks for the explanation, although I think I've read posts of agent mischief with car assignments and routing on the Op-Sig group, but they were likely rare. Your points make sense to me, but

Group, Five years ago I went through all the yard lists for one location, (Forrest, IL on the Wabash) for an entire month (March 1955) focusing on foreign house cars, mostly 40' with a few 50' cars.

Looking for photos and/or car numbers, and any info as to geography, year or service assignment of ATSF hoppers painted black, especially '34 AAR type offset triples (Ga-73 etc). Many Thanks! Olin

Dan Holbrock writes: "After 35 years of railroading and sitting in clerks, yardmasters, car distributors, trainmasters chairs I'll throw in my two cents. Yardmasters did not supply cars to

The cheaters way.... Pick a location and period you like to model and try and find a photo of a nearby yard if possible. Buy only the cars in the photo ;) Jim Eckman

Kurt Of the 533 saved emails from Tim Gilbert in my Eudora mail boxes, maybe 200 are concerned with freight car distribution and LCL... But you are probably thinking of the old Freightcars list.

Nope. The vast majority of this previous discussion happened on this list. I don't think Tim was ever on The Freightcars List. BTW, I was wondering the other day about the archive for The

After 35 years of railroading and sitting in clerks, yardmasters, car distributors, trainmasters chairs I'll throw in my two cents. Yardmasters did not supply cars to industries. Unless it was a

Dave The Southern Pacific would number specially equipped or assigned box cars into various 600000 series. Cars moved in and out of these series as needs changed. I have to think the whole logic of

I think they are referring to a previous USENET-based mailing list whose archives is out in the ether somewhere. I occaisionally run across individual threads when doing a google search, but I

Dave This sounds highly unrealistic to me. A freight yard is not a deck of cards. A string of MT box cars is held on a track. The yard clerk has a list of them, but all the agent knows is that there