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.