Forty-foot PS-1 12-panel Box Cars

San Diego, California, December 27, 1956, Col. Chet McCoid photo, Bob's Photo

In my various clinics on 'oddball' 40' PS-1s I have touched on the 12-panel box car variants (link to presentations). I have wanted to model a couple of them and will start expanding upon that here with the two prototypes I intend to replicate in HO scale. One is a Mississippi Central car and the other is a Nickel Plate prototype. The Mississippi Central has been released by Intermountain using their PS-1, which is not accurate for this car, but offered nonetheless, no doubt due the the attractive scheme and the sales it could generate. The Mississippi Central had 100 cars, nos. 5000-5099, delivered in June, 1949 by Pullman-Standard. Nickel Plate received 1,000 12-panel PS-1 box cars, nos. 6000-6999, delivered by Pullman-Standard in early 1948.

courtesy of Al Hoffman

The starting point for the Mississippi Central car is the original Kadee PS-1 with six-foot door opening. The biggest consideration aside from the specialties of the prototype (hand brake, running boards, etc.) is the 12 panels. More on that in the post on modeling the cars. It's a relatively easy car to model, though.

Until late 2018, the Nickel Plate car would have required a more formidable effort. However, the recent release by Kadee of the early version of the PS-1 makes things considerably easier. The main thing to be addressed, assuming one chooses to, is the underframe (aside from the number of panels, of course.) For the earlier cars Kadee opted to leave the underframe tooling from the original kit unchanged, even though it is not technically accurate. Early PS-1s used what was in essence a welded AAR underframe, while the Kadee model uses the later proprietary PS-1 underframe. I will cover my efforts to address that in the subsequent posts on modeling these cars.

Wordy Wednesday - Loading Stacked Steel Plate

I chose this photo for today’s Wordy Wednesday post because I feel it illustrates something worth replicating in model form. Note the small steels plates in the two gondolas closest to the left edge of the photo. The plates are stacked at both ends of the cars. They are also laid on top of boards and separated by boards, as well. The center portion of the gons are “empty”. This is highly realistic and would be easy to replicate using sheet styrene cut into appropriate sizes and stacked and bundled, as shown. I will do a follow-up post in the near future illustrating how I replicate this.

The near gon is a Nickel Plate Greenville-design 52’6” car offered in HO in styrene by Life-Like Proto 2000 and previously in resin by Sunshine. The next car is a P&LE 70-ton USRA-design car. These are available in resin from Westerfield and in styrene from Walthers in a far simpler (less detailed) form. Protocraft has imported O scale brass models of Greenville-design 52’6” gondolas.

The image was recorded looking east at the Nickel Plate’s E 75th Street Yard in Cleveland, Ohio, circa 1949. The photographer is noted as “Burger” and the photo is from the Jay Williams/Big Four Graphics collection