The Unofficial Micro-Trains® Release Report Issue #248 – August, 2017 (Not Affiliated with Micro-Trains Line, Inc.) Copyright ©2017, George J
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IrwinsJournal.com Presents: The Unofficial Micro-Trains® Release Report Issue #248 – August, 2017 (Not affiliated with Micro-Trains Line, Inc.) Copyright ©2017, George J. Irwin. Reproduction prohibited. Please see legal notice at the end of this document. Hello again everyone… There’s a good variety of rolling stock to review, from a lady “chasing dirt” on one side of two cars in both N and Z Scales, to a “Kid Glove” treatment, to a container with a millionth load, to a pair of Operation Lifesaver cabooses. But before we get to that… the biggest announcement is of a small but important piece part in N Scale: metal wheels. I’ll just be lazy here and paraphrase the Micro- Trains description: these wheelsets have chemically blackened 33 inch wheels detailed on both sides and fitted to plastic axles. They’re designed to fit all MTL trucks. They are available in 12-packs, to convert three standard cars (003 12 020, $11.95) or 60-packs, to convert fifteen standard cars (003 12 021, $52.95). Micro-Trains has been soliciting input from N Scalers for some time about this product, and with generally positive responses, I’m told. These metal wheels enter a bit of a crowded market, and I suspect that online chatter with respect to comparison to already available metal wheels will fill several screens at least. I hope the discussion is civil. Let’s see what else is going on behind the red and yellow sign this month. That includes another change to my categories in N Scale. I don’t know why I didn’t think of this last month when the new body styles “split” freight cars catalog numbers to after passenger cars. N SCALE NEW RELEASE FREIGHT CARS: 027 00 430, $25.90 Reporting Marks: BN 321625. 50 Foot Steel Exterior Post Boxcar, Single Plug Door, Burlington Northern. Cascade green with aluminum roof. Mostly white lettering including roadname and reporting marks on left and large BN herald on right. Multicolor ACI Label and white on black double panel COTS stencils on far right. Simulated white reflective rectangles along bottom sill. Approximate Time Period: 1975 (build date) into the first decade of the 2000s. Technically a new release, but there have been Special Runs with this paint scheme commissioned by Joint Line N Scale in August 2004 with Road Numbers 321632, 321668, 321888, and 321990, NSE Numbers 04-91 to 04-94, and October 2004 with Road Numbers 322008, 322026, 322063, and 322066, NSE Numbers 04-104 to 04-107. 1 BN boxcar 321625 was in its third year of service when photographed in July, 1977 in Las Vegas, Nevada. The photo appears on Page 32 of the Burlington Northern Color Guide to Freight and Passenger Equipment. It was built by American Car & Foundry in March 1975. Color Guide author David Casdorph notes, “New built Plate B 50 foot 6 inch loader-equipped cars were uncommon at this time.” The 20 inch cushioning is made obvious by the quite-extended draft gear on this car. As an AC&F product, it was a bit different from the FMC car on which the MTL 027 body style is based. The biggest difference I see from this photo is the roof angle. The Official Railroad Equipment Register (ORER) for April 1976 shows the series BN 321600 to 322099 with its full complement of 500 cars. They are described as “Box, Moveable Bulkheads, 50K” with AAR Designation XL. The inside length is shown as 50 feet 6 inches, inside height 10 feet 7 inches, outside length 58 feet 1 inch, extreme height 15 feet, door opening 10 feet wide, and capacity 4973 cubic feet (a bit smaller than what MTL models) or 149,000 pounds. As of the January 2000 ORER, there were 331 cars in the BN series as part of BNSF. “20 inch travel” referring to the cushioning and “Nailable Steel Floors” had been added to the description. As of my latest ORER, October 2014, just one car was shown in revenue service. Some of the BN cars went to the BNSF series 713924 to 714349. Twenty of those BNSF cars were in service in 2008. MTL has already done BNSF 714083 (027 00 300, January 2008) BNSF 714014, (027 50 300, Runner Pack #63, May 2012). I wanted to get a look at the roof of the prototype car for comparison purposes. Over on the site RRPictureArchives is an overhead image of BN 321872, showing a delta. Let me see if I can get this right: the real car has a diagonal panel roof while the model has an X-panel roof. Whatever kind of roof, much of the aluminum paint has worn off. I can also report that at least sister car BN 321966 made it into the “herald only” scheme as of July 2000, BN 321864 was in the Reporting Marks Only scheme in May 1999, and that BN 321637, still in its original paint, was serving as a spacer car in a welded rail train in February 2016, with the note “Side Doors Welded Shut” stenciled between grab irons on the far left. Those images were from RailcarPhotos, RRPictureArchives, and RRPictureArchives again, respectively. There are plenty of other images of this series of cars on those two sites and on Fallen Flags. 032 00 500, $26.90 Reporting Marks: EELX 60003. 50 Foot Steel Boxcar, Single Plug Door, Evans Railcar. Blue with mostly white lettering including reporting marks on left and “DF-B Loader” on right. Yellow legend “Hydra-Cushion for Fragile Freight” on left. “The Kid Glove Treatment!” in black on white on right with multicolor illustration of a boxcar in a gloved hand. Approximate Time Period: 1962 (build date) into the 1970s. First, allow me to dispel my own misconception of the term “kid gloves.” This has nothing to do with children, unless you mean young goats, the skin of which was used to literally produce “kid gloves.” “The Phrase Finder,” a site based in the United Kingdom, defines the term as “Handle a situation, or a person or an object, delicately and gingerly.” It’s also noted that “kid 2 gloves” were initially made from lambskin and that in the 1700s, “kid gloves were viewed as rather ostentatious and only suitable for the nouveau riche” though their stature improved in the 1800s. Back to freight cars, and cargo within them that was constantly subject to damage. How to reduce rising claim costs became a focus for American Railroads after the Second World War. Damage control devices of various types began appearing in the mid-1950s. One example is the joint venture of General American and Evans which resulted in the green boxcars which carried some railroad heralds and the “Damage Free” diagonal stripe. These have been previously offered by Micro-Trains. And that leads me to another of my own misconceptions: I thought that I’d seen a prototype photo of the boxcar MTL offers this month. After a fair amount of searching, It looks like the answer to that one is “no”—and by the way, the phrase “Evans Boxcar” is not very helpful in a search, nor is “Evans Kid Glove.” There are plenty of snapshots of the Athearn model of this paint scheme in HO Scale. Not exactly what I meant! Well, there’s still the ORER on which to fall back, although it won’t help with the decoration. Page 693 of the July 1963 Register lists the entire roster of the Evans Equipment Leasing Company in a single line: five boxcars, EELX 60000 to 60004. They were listed as “Refrigerator, Plug Doors” with AAR Classification RBL, typical for plug door boxcars at the time. An end note called out the Hydra-Cushion Underframe, DFB Device and Adjustable Side Fillers. The inside length was 50 feet 1 inch, inside height 9 feet 10 inches, outside length 55 feet 1 inch, extreme height 15 feet 1 inch and capacity 4644 cubic feet or 136,000 pounds. Evans is also listed as the owner and shipper. The January 1967 ORER shows those same five cars, plus one covered gondola and one bulkhead flat car, with EELX reporting marks. The owner has changed to United States Railway Leasing Company, which, curiously, has a second ORER registration in the “text only” section of private owners and another 242 cars of various types. It’s all combined in the April 1970 Equipment Register, where the five EELX boxcars are just a rounding error in the total roster of 1997 cars, most of which carry USLX reporting marks. In the July 1974 ORER, just the 60000 and 60003 remain in service out of the original five cars. Both of those last into the 1980s, but the running boards surely wouldn’t have, and I can’t say that the paint scheme did either. In fact, a shot of EELX 60000 captioned as being from 1975 shows the car without the “Kid Glove Treatment” artwork. That helps to call the Approximate Time Period as only going into the 1970s. You’ve probably already noticed that the “Hydra-Cushion for Fragile Freight” lettering on this car matches that on a large number of Southern Pacific and Cotton Belt boxcars. That was a marketing item for the SP. In 1964 they issued a brochure about Hydra-Cushion and how it worked… and it’s reproduced online! See www.carrtracks.com/sphc01.htm . The Hydra- Cushion design was developed by William K. McCurdy of the Stanford Research Institute; SP introduced it in 1956. McCurdy later went to Evans which licensed some of the technology from the SP.