Wooden Hoppers

The EarlyRail group at Yahoo has been abuzz with Westerfield's release of this beauty - a Pennsy coal hopper from the early 1890s. I've never built a Westerfield kit, although I periodically slaver over their Pressed Steel Car Co. ore cars, but these might just get me off the fence, even at that price. I've always liked coal hauling railroads, in part because they're high-traffic, heavy-duty operations: Virginian, N&W, the D&RGW in Utah, the Reading, and of course, B&O in West Virginia. Coal hauling meant mountains, and long trains, which meant multiple locomotives - usually the biggest ones available, to squeeze the maximum tonnage out of the crew's wages. Most commercially available coal hoppers tend to be from a later era - the composite cars usually are post-1910, and the steel hoppers started showing up in the Twenties. Tichy Train Group's ore cars had the authentic wooden look, but they were too short - ore, after all, was much heavier than coal, and companies put a lot less car on a pair of trucks to compensate.