Hello group,

I am working on a few N scale 1937 AAR boxcars (Intermountain), to be finished
in the NP series 15000-17996. My modeling era is 1960.

Did NP rebuild all of these '37 boxcars by 1960, or were there some left in the
original config? I searched the message archive but didn't find any details
about which cars were rebuilt and when.

Thanks!

Frank Amato

Frank,

I believe the NP started the re-building of these cars in 1957 or 58
and continued into the late 60's...

I don't know what the percentage of rebuilt cars in 1960 is, but I
would guess that the number of rebuild was still small...Seems like
they did the majority of work from 1964 on...

The NP modelers yahoo group has had many posts regarding these cars
also...

Matt Sugerman,
Ft. Worth, TX

--- In STMFC@..., amato@... wrote:

Hello group,

I am working on a few N scale 1937 AAR boxcars (Intermountain), to

be finished

in the NP series 15000-17996. My modeling era is 1960.

Did NP rebuild all of these '37 boxcars by 1960, or were there some

left in the

original config? I searched the message archive but didn't find

any details

about which cars were rebuilt and when.

Thanks!

Frank Amato

Frank, Matt may be right, but I think you can probably get a ballpark
answer this way: very few cars in his series were rebuilt in 1955;
nearly all were rebuilt by 1970. If you assume there was a roughly
linear shop rotation of these cars during that interval, you get 7
percent per year rebuilt, or a crude guess on the order of 35 percent
with rebuilt side sills by 1960. Judging from looking at a lot of
photos, I think this isn't far from the mark.

Matt Herson might have more specific data, I know he has looked into
this. A significant proportion of cars in this series were rebuilt
before the NP's adoption of the post-steam-era billboard/jumbo monad
paint scheme.

It's beyond this group's era, but relevant to your quetion that in
years of looking I have located only one or two photographs of NP 40ft
AAR steel boxcars retaining their original tab sills by 1969-70, out
of hundreds of cars examined.

Chris Frissell
Polson, MT

In STMFC@..., "Matt Sugerman" <camas74@...> wrote: