Freight Car Roster 3

I sat down and made up a grid of freight cars for Burnham Yard based on the figures I extracted from looking at the photographs I had to hand. And I now have a copy Interurban to Milwaukee, CERA Bulletin 106, which arrived today. I shall look through it and probably be able to add some more freight cars numbers from the photographs. Fingers crossed.

Also, geek that I am, I've been making notes on freight car emblems and will therefore be able to go back and classify the identities of cars from blurred photographs, which I couldn't do on my first run through. From this I have created a grid of freight cars for my layout.

Note: BHFC is bulk head flat car, other covers stock cars, as I have one.

Obviously, this table is not written in stone and is subject to amendments, if a shiny new freight car take my fancy. Also, not included are tank cars and reefers, which I will add according to what I have in combination with the national freight car distribution figures.

Freight cars really epitomise why I chose the title for this blog, because this really is an opportunity to have no two alike.

Burnham Yard Road Further Revisions

I've been working on the railroad, and while doing so was looking at how I was going to treat the transition of the track through the return loop staging. As a result I started looking at the maps of the area I have from Google and realising that I had made a mistake with the orientation of the street blocks. That is I had set them with the longest side facing the baseboard edge, whereas in fact they should have been orientated with the shortest length to the front of the layout.

I also realised that given the location of the layout, in a square between Franklin, Orleans, Oak and Chicago that I would not have a North to South road running on the layout. So I got the big ruler out and my tape measure and looked at what had to be done to rectify this mistake?

As can be seen from the above picture the result is that it has become easier for me to transition the tracks through the return loop staging. The road to the far left of this picture is only on the drawing for reference to the real location in Chicago, as it represents West Institute Place. 

On the layout we have West Chestnut Street, West Locust Street, and depending on the finding out the date the name was changed, West Whiting/Walton Street. To the right, off board, would be Oak Street, and to the left, off board, would be West Chicago Avenue. Franklin Street would run across the front of the layout if I had room, and North Orleans Street would be at the back of the baseboard.

With the upper level elevated track the plan now looks like this.

I'm thinking about using the Micro-Engineering street viaduct, but I have found another dealer who does laser cut Chicago elevated structures in peel and stick wood. I will have to find out more from people who know more than me.

   

Tri-Wire Harness for DCC

I was going to call this piece "All Wired Up", but when I got to this stage I realised that I might be set upon by the DCC manufacturers for showing that two wires to the rail doesn't mean just two wires to wire the layout.

Now any beginners reading this, take a deep breath, let it out and relax. I really only have used three wires, and the third is only for the turnouts, but what I have done is wired this layout in a way that maximises the chances of it running without glitches from power not getting to all the rails.

Anyway, I started working on wiring the layout by doing the right hand board (North side of the layout) first as it had the fewest droppers, and only one turnout to do.



See not that bad heh? I then went on to the left side the layout as that had the next smallest number of droppers to wire up.

Okay that's a few more wiring runs, but you only ever do one-at-a-time, unless you have more than one pair of hands?  I start with the dropper furthest away from the bus bar point as it makes the process of threading the wires easier. What's a bus bar? It's where you collect all the wires together to solder them up, and I'll show this in another post.

Finally I tackled the centre board that has the largest number of droppers and turnouts to wire.

Now that's more like it! Loads of lovely wires to keep the juice flowing where it needs to go.

I've only coiled the wires like this, because the layout sits above our sofa, and I don't want my hair full of copper wire while we watch a film tonight. For those of you who are extra observant see if you can spot the two missing wire runs in the completed sections that I only noticed I hadn't done after I took the photographs.

And now I have a wiring harness, ho ho ho!

Changing the Era

I consider era as part and parcel of the whole layout planning gig. The choices we make about these things all have an affect on each other. So when one chooses the location it determines the railroad's infrastructure, and of course the locomotives, and the freight cars that we all love to model. Therefore I have been  paying some attention to the freight car roster for my layout, and as you have all probably guessed by now, I'm a bit of a freight car addict.

In my opinion a great majority of the time spent modelling will be spent making freight cars as you need more than one per locomotive that you own. So, as a consequence the choice of freight cars will have an impact on the veracity of the era that one is trying to portray.

My initial plan was to model 1948. As I would I get to run locomotives #450 and #459 without generating any anachronisms. It also meant that the Suydam coach I have of the 737 series wouldn't have to have its roof modernised, as several were still running with their original ventilation and heating equipment, after 1950 they were all modernised with forced ventilation.

However, I had a bunch of nice Kadee PS-1 box cars that have 1951 built dates on them.

What to do? I like the cars. The models are exemplary, and there is a substantial dollar investment to account for, which means I'm not inclined to sell them at a loss. Easy answer is of course to change the date the layout is set in. So, I moved my era to 1951, but now locomotive  #450 becomes an anomaly. I can just about get away with the 737 series interurban as the last one was modernised in October 1950. Okay, who am I kidding, it too become an anachronism?

Then there are the Silverliner cars. If I am modelling 1951 I get the bonus of now running the first of the Silverliner conversions. So every cloud has a silver lining!

I then pottered off thinking nothing more until today about the era, but then an idea struck me. Why am I fixating on 1948? Yes I know it's to do with locomotive #450, but given the location is freelanced I could easily rationalise the anachronism of #450 by saying it was kept as there was still work it could usefully do at Burnham Yard. Pretty close to the reason it was scrapped for in real life, in that this locomotive worked down on Montrose Avenue switching flat cars for the North Shore's trailer service, which was abandoned at the end of 1947.

So I thought to myself, what era would I like to do?

The 1950s are quite attractive in that the later motor cars started to have fins and get interesting. Also, the North Shore wasn't abandoned until 1963, so I could even push the date slightly more forward. Thinking about it, I'm not sure I want to run representing the last three years when the line ran under the increasing threat of closure, its just not a happy place. Also, the Chicago Aurora & Elgin was abandoned in 1959, and this is one of my connecting railroads for my fictitious what if scheme.

So 1959 it is.

This opens up certain choices for freight cars, which is a good thing. Bad things are having to modernise the roofs of one or more of my 700 series interurbans, as I know that there were only a handful still running with original roofs by 1959.

Freight Car Roster 2

As part of my ongoing research into all things North Shore, I have been looking at freight cars seen on the line. I therefore sat down and went through all the books I own, counted the number of pictures that featured a freight locomotive, and counted the number, type and where possible identified the owning railroad reporting marks of said freight cars.

Sources

I looked at through the following nine books:

Days of the North Shore, published by National Bus Trader.
Chicago North Shore & Milwaukee in Color Volume 1, published by Morning Sun.
Chicago North Shore & Milwaukee in Color Volume 2, published by Morning Sun.
Interurban Trains to Chicago, published by Iconografix.
North Shore America's Fastest Interurban,  published by Golden West Books.
North Shore Line Interurban Freight, published by Pixels Publishing.
North Shore South Shore, published by Heimburger House Publishing Company.
Route of the Electroliners, published by Chicago Electric Railfans' Association #107.
The Insull Chicago Interurbans in Color, published by Morning Sun.

Photographic Data

So let's start with raw numbers of photographs.

In total I counted a 171 pictures that had a freight locomotive in it, or freight cars seen from the cab window of a freight locomotive.  Of this total 67 came from the North Shore Line Interurban Freight book, which is not all that surprising in itself. However, given that these books are largely pictorial tomes with about three photographs on each double page spread, with approximately 200 pages per book, then the number of pictures of freight operations is quite small in comparison to approximately 2500 pictures I looked through. 

Railroad Reporting Marks

Next let me present the railroad reporting marks I was able to identify.

14 cars: CNS&M  (see Note 1)
13 cars: MILW (see Note 2).
10 cars: NYC.
8 cars: PRR.
7 cars: SP.
5 cars; AT&SF and SOU.
4 cars: CB&Q, GM&O, IC, N&W.
3 cars: CE&I and NWX.
2 cars: B&O, EJ&E, CNR, C&NW, L&N, and the GN.
1 car; CG, CRI&P, D&H, E&L, L&M, NADX, NJI&I, and the WM.

So out of one hundred and seventy-one photographs I was able to identify 27 railroad reporting marks, and 89 individual cars from them.

Note 1: excluded from totals as these were all from pictures showing the TOFC service that was abandoned in 1947. Also excluded and not counted were pictures of work cars.

Note 2: not including one picture showing a train with thirty 50 ton iron ore hoppers being pulled by the three GE steeple cabs as the identity was not readily ascertainable from the photograph and I'm therefore unable confirm the veracity of the caption.

Freight Cars

The other thing I did was identify the type of freight car seen in the photographs.

213 Box cars (48%).
123 Hoppers (28%).
45 Gondolas (10%).
21 Tank cars (5%).
14 TOFC (see note).
12 Flat cars (3%).
10 Covered hoppers (2%).
7 Reefers (2%).
6 Bulk head flat cars (2%).

All percentages were rounded out.

Note: excluded from totals as the TOFC service that was abandoned in 1947.

Conclusion

When compared to the figures from the national average, we see some interesting variations from the normal distribution occurring. Starting with the standouts.

First is the Chicago & Eastern Illinois comes in with three cars, which is 21 times larger than the national average would predict. In second place comes Elgin Joliet & Eastern with two cars, which is eight and a half times the number one might expect to see.

After this three railroads are in joint third place. The Gulf Mobile & Ohio and Norfolk & Western both of each with four cars photographed, which represents four times the expected number. Surprisingly, the Western Maryland is also out of the standard distribution whose single car identified from a photograph  represents four times the number one would expect to see.

In fourth place is the Milwaukee with 13 cars, whose numbers represent three and a quarter times more cars than the average, but given it was a connecting railroad perhaps this is not so surprising after all? Running close to this was the Delaware & Hudson, with one car representing three times the number the national fleet average predicts.

In fifth place there are five railroads represented. The Illinois Central with four cars, the Southern Pacific with seven cars, the Southern Railway with five cars, with both the Louisville & Nashville, and Central of Georgia with one car each, were nearly double the number of cars  expected to be seen from the average.

In sixth place the Burlington with four cars was up by one, which was a third larger than expected.

Falling within one deviation of the average are the New York Central with ten cars. up by two, which is a quarter more than expected. Then the Santa Fe's five cars up by one from the national average number was a fifth higher than expected.

Meanwhile, the Pennsylvania Railroad with eight, and the Great Northern with two cars, pretty much match what the national average suggests we should be seeing from these two railroads. And if you count the Litchfield and Madison car as a Chicago & North Western car, then this railroad have had a total of three cars, which also matches the national average.

The first of the three railroads down on their numbers by a third is the Baltimore & Ohio with two cars, as is the Erie & Lackawanna with only one car photographed. However, the latter was a new reporting mark as the railroad only came into existence in 1960 with the merger of the Erie and the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad. Also seen was a New Jersey Indiana & Illinois railroad car, a Wabash subsidiary, whose one car means that the Wabash representation is down by a third too.

Coming in lower still is the Rock Island with the one car ,which is half the number expected, go figure? Finally, the Canadian National with 2 cars is a quarter of the number expected by the national fleet average for North American cars, but may well be in line with the number of cars interchanged with the United States?

Freight cars I can't readily account for with the data I have to hand are the three NWX and one NADX reefers. No doubt more information will come to light at some point.

Disclaimer: Of course now that I've posted this piece and had chance to reflect and think upon it, I realise that I've forgotten to add that terms and conditions apply, errors and omissions excepted, and numbers can go down as well as up, or something like that. Also I've made some egregious assumptions too. Playing rough and ready with the statistics, but hey that is what they are there for, right?

Freight Car Roster 1

I have a few freight cars, more than I've shown here on my blog, as most are still works in progress. When I show works in progress I like to at least show some progress that amounts to more than just opened the box and plonked it down on the track. At least showing the change of wheels, trucks and couplers as necessary to bring my freight cars to the standards I set for the layout, which may seem idiosyncratic, but that's me.

Now I'm basing my freight car roster on data I have about 1950s freight cars. So if I had a hundred freight cars, then very roughly the numbers would break down for the big six railroads as follows:

8 cars: New York Central
8 cars: Pennsylvania Railroad
4 cars: Atchison Topeka & Santa Fe 
4 cars: Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul & Pacific
4 cars: Southern Pacific ,
3 cars: Baltimore & Ohio

I then looked at all the railroads that go to Chicago, and or had some connection to the North Shore. This came from information about routing I've come across and from maps of the area. As far as I can ascertain there were six as follows:

3 cars: CB&Q
3 cars: C&NW
2 cars: IC
2 cars:  Rock Island
1 car: EJ&E
1 car: Soo Line

Then I looked at photographs of freight operations on the North Shore and came up with another fifteen railroads where I could clearly identify the reporting marks. I will choose to use national percentages for these lines too.

3 cars: SOU
3 cars: GN
2 cars: L&N
1 car: C&EI, CofG, D&H, E&L, GM&O, L&M, MC (NYC subsidiary), NJI&I, N&W, WM.

I also have to add the CNR too, and they had a large number of cars, but how many came South in 1948, I don't know?

I also need to add reefers from NADX, NWX, and tank cars

I also have other cars from my first project that I want to run. These include seven tank cars, two PFE reefers and a WP gondola. In addition I have extra cars from the SP and UP too. For a grand total of fourteen extra cars.

So it looks like my initial estimate of 61 freight cars has now risen to a grand total of 75.

At best guesstimate my total staging and online spots for cars comes to fifty cars, which by a rule of thumb means the layout will cope with about thirty, so I can see that I will have to rotate cars off the layout. No bad thing, but quite an eye opener.
   
More to follow on the photographic evidence.