I received an email from a regular blog visitor at the end of 2015 that posed some very interesting questions. Here’s the message.
“Many of your recent posts describe prototypes built no more than fifteen years prior to your 1926 modeling period.
Do you know of – or have a feel for – the average age of the freight car fleet at that time? It seems to me that the great majority of the prototypes you have modeled so far represent relatively new cars. I know there was a lot of rolling stock construction going on around the end of the First World War and through the nineteen-twenties, but how much of this replaced older cars, rather than augmenting them and growing the overall fleet size?
I also am aware that car (and train) weights were increasing at that time so the very oldest cars may no longer have been man enough to run with the new construction, but presumably you need some cars built prior to 1910 or so to maintain a representative total fleet?”
There are some good questions here for anyone modeling the 1920s or a specific era. Let’s take a look at each question and some data and opinion.
