28' boxcars

So this is the project I’ve just completed – a set of five BTS Pennsylvania Railroad XA-class 28’ boxcars. Twenty-eight foot cars were very common in the period between the end of the Civil War and the First World War, and they were state-of-the-art in the 1870s, when the XAs were built: they have a definite “shorty” look, even compared to the 34’ cars that replaced them. Like a lot of modelers, my freight car fleet began with the injection-molded MDC 34’ and 40’ boxcar kits that have been on the market since time immemorial, and I never thought much about anything else until I started doing some research on the 1870-1910 era; I had sort of mentally walled off small boxcars as Civil War/Central Pacific-era equipment. My reading on the Colorado Midland confirmed this prejudice: the Midland was built in the late 1880s, and its boxcar fleet was all 34-40’ cars, and you don’t see much small foreign road equipment in the pictures, probably because the Midland restricted the number of non air-braked cars that could be included in trains. I was therefore very surprised when I found a pair of tables that catalogued the numbers of box cars on the Philadelphia and Reading at the turn of the century and shortly thereafter, and found that a substantial number of 20-22 ton cars (which were probably about 28’ long) were still in revenue service. But this seems to have been fairly typical, particularly for roads that had been around for more than twenty years before the turn of the century.

This turned out to be great; I had always liked the look and the proportions of the shorter cars, particularly the original Central Pacific equipment (I still have one of Rio Grande Models’ CP ventilated boxcars on a shelf awaiting my attention), and they have certain aesthetic and operational advantages. They’re shorter – here’s a picture showing how five 28’ cars fit in the space occupied by four 34’ cars – they tend to emphasize the age of the layout, and they don’t dominate the surrounding scenery and buildings. I was looking for cars that could, once built, become a sort of rolling scenic background. Not everything can stick out on a model railroad, and not everything should. I was looking for decently unobtrusive equipment that would be era-appropriate without distracting the viewer away from the structures, locomotives, or specialized equipment that deserves a prominent place. I also wanted a group of cars that looked the same, to provide the “fleet” feeling you get on a real railroad.

All of these considerations made the BTS cars a natural choice. They were also economical: they are sold individually for $22.95, and you can get a five-pack for $99.95, which is a $14 savings - almost enough to order a sixth car. They don’t come with trucks, but I wanted a 4’6” wheelbase truck with a high diamond arch bar, and Bitter Creek had just the thing. You can put bigger trucks under them, of course, but at some point you run into a proportionality problem, because they look too big for the car – some of the early BTS cars on their website, for example, were built with the generic-looking MDC arch bar trucks from those 34’ boxcars, and they look just a bit too big. I have used Rio Grande Models CP arch bars (as seen on the ventilated boxcar) in the past, but I decided to try the Bitter Creek trucks, and I like them. They’re the perfect length, and they come assembled, so you just have to paint them.

The BTS kits are laser-cut, and they build up very well. When you do five of them at once, you can assemble them all together, and this saves a considerable amount of time. At some point I’m going to letter them, but it may be months before I do that. I recently saw a nice picture of some NP boxcars in Bob Lorenz’s book on NP steam, and the consist included several cars that were obviously of the same class, decorated in the same way. In a nice “period” touch, the “Northern Pacific” was painted as a sort of arc on one side of the car, and I really liked the introduction of the curve into a surface that’s otherwise wholly linear – boxcar lines, after all, are pretty much linear or angular.