Initially I used the random number generator in Excel and assigned a unique number to each car.?? Using the built-in parameters and playing with the numbers, I was eventually able to make it work.? Since then I have ?moved to Ship It.

Rich Orr

Jim;

To follow up, on "Simple, grubby, common, random, no apparent purpose, bad
boys..... ", probably a pretty good description, but not 100% grubby, in
fact. If you look through color yard shots, and the body of Paul Winters
photos, you see certain themes:

1) randomness and sometime groupings; common and then some rare ones;
2) lots of rust, some good, fading, but obviously weathering; a few in new
paint, or newly-rebuilt;
3) whatever is there is strongly representative of where and when. 30th
Street on the Mon had mostly PRR gons, and then gons in general, Shire Oaks
mostly PRR hoppers, lots of P&LE because of Monongahela Rwy interchanging,
28th Street (Strip) - produce reefers, etc.
4) Many different variations of "Freight Car Color", but class dependent

B&O was the same! Dull but still bright Red fading to pink early classes
(M-26 & M-27 classes), to browner C&O-influenced recent rebuilds, really
rusty to pretty new black hoppers, nice grey to filthy grey covered hoppers,
horrendous (particuclarly O-27 classes) to brand-new gons.

Frankly, the most difficult part of this, I think, is the weathering. You
can't just spray on a coat of Grimy Black and call it "steam-era"-suitable
weathering. EVERY car had a different life, and it showed! This is now, by
far, the most time-consuming, and thought-provoking segment of my hobby.

Elden Gatwood

--- In STMFC@..., "Gatwood, Elden J SAD " <elden.j.gatwood@...> wrote:

B&O was the same! Dull but still bright Red fading to pink early classes
(M-26 & M-27 classes), to browner C&O-influenced recent rebuilds,

----------------------------------------------------
I think Elden momentarily forgot the 1960 cut-off date of this list when referring to C&O influence on B&O's car fleet. That started (just) a few years later.
Scott Pitzer

--- In STMFC@..., "rwitt_2000" <rwitt_2000@...> wrote:

Jerry Glow wrote:

IMHO you need to study your interchange partners and patterns. It is

less likely that a nearby road's cars would be on yours than a distant
one. Not impossible but to me, less likely. Of course we all are PRR
modelers regardless of what we call our railroad <G> but in my case

that

is VERY true as PRR interchanged with my modeled MP mainly in St Louis
and many cars were subject of Dick Kulbs (and others') photos in

Texas.

I agree with Jerry although I would add that its the customers that
determine the freight car traffic patterns.

In each area industries determine the shipping patterns. As a counter

to

Jerry's assumption that interchange is more likely with "distant"
railroads I provide the following example. In Madison Wisconsin, the
Milwaukee Road served the University heating plant, but the coal
contract was with mines in southern Illinois. So the coal came via the
Illinois Central usually in their hoppers. The IC interchanged with

the

Milwaukee Road. The MILW took the hoppers, spotted them at the

unloading

facility in the coal storage yard for the heating plant. They were
unloaded and returned empty to the IC. All this activity occurred

within

an area of one square city block.

Bob Witt

I started out planning to use the mix Bruce Chubb recommended in
hisbook, "How to Operate your model railroad", then modifying it to
reflect large shippers and industries in the area I'm modeling. I have
managed to stick pretty close to it now that I've been buying the cars I
need. It's an interesting article but the basic premise is
straightforward. Based on talking yardmasters,Jim Hediger found that
the consensus was the following:


Home Road 50%
Primary Connections 25%
Secondary Connections 15%
Others roads and private owners 10%



Box Cars 43%
Flat Cars 4%
Stock Cars 3%
Gondola 12%
Hopper 32%
Covered Hopper 2%
Tank 1%
Refrigerator 3%


(the above car types are the result of averaging the six railroads
usedas examples in the article)


I got the majority of my fleet (about 2/3 of the cars I planned for)
based on the above ratios, then got the balance based on the large
shippers and receivers I plan along with the major connections involved
in serving them. I have a "thing" for short Covered Hoppers so
it was sometimes tough to stick to the plan, but I just remembered that
I had the other third of the fleet to plan another way and was able to
stick with it. Once I started adding hoppers, I ended up with closer to
50% of my roster based on the above and 50% based on the large
industries I serve.


I weather by taking one car of the appropriate type for each of the
online and modeled industries on my layout, then weathering that car as
I think it would be if that were the only shipper/recipient the car ever
serviced. I repeat that with a second and sometimes a third car for
that industry, each with a different roadname. From that pair or trio
per industry, I go to groups of three or five cars of a type and weather
each group based on one ofsix route profiles I made up that vary in
degrees of "grubby". That leaves the cars that always pass through such
as coal drags and reefer expresses, etc. I weather those blocks of cars
based on what their real world route would have been, then looking over
the route to determine what level of grubby seems appropriate. Things
from the Southwest have a whole different set of weathering colors and
degree of weathering than do cars from industrial areas in the East or
Midwest, for example.


This ended up with a lot of cars with the same road name but very
different weathering and blocks of cars that look like they all went
through the same type ofweathering. My reefers are something of an
exception since I figure they're washed or repainted a good bit more
often than other cars. I based that on what I recall as a child when
there was never a problem telling if a white reefer was white, grey, or
some off white color which means they were washed or painted often. The
same is true of PFE cars I have although they're usually in blocks of
the same degree of weathering, some blocks very clean, some mildly
grubby. (I finally got a couple of books on reefers, and the approach I
was using seems fine based on what the real world reefer companies were
doing back then.) One thing, though, I found that weathering all the
trucks at least moderately, no matter what degree of weathering the car
has, seemed to make everything look better when a train rolls past or
when the cars are among many others in a yard. Setting large groups of
cars out in a temporary yard (rows of straight track on a 4x6) the mix
looks pretty realistic to me. I know the times are a lot different, but
the local Southern yard has pretty much the same look inspite of there
being much different car types.



I think using some basic formula is the best way to start, but not
really the way to build your entire fleet. You may want to do 50% of
your cars to a formula rather than two-thirds if you have some special
types of cars you really like, but you'd still have a large percentage
of your fleet looking like what was found to be areasonable mix based on
interviewing folks in the real world.





Regards,

Robert Hume