Research – Page 3 – Notes on Designing, Building, and Operating Model Railroads

Lehigh Valley boxcar fleet

Lehigh Valley boxcars seem to appear frequently in pre-Depression era railroad images. I’ve inquired many times about their pre-1930s boxcar fleet details but most of the Lehigh Valley fans and modelers I’ve met know little about the early 1900s fleet.

The October 1926 ORER lists 13,144 boxcars in the LV fleet. Only 2,040 of those have a 40-foot interior length, most of those are automobile boxcars. The rest of their boxcars have interior lengths of 36-foot, 6-inch, or less. Nearly 3,500 cars in one number series had a 34-foot interior length, which is shorter than I expected for a mid-1920s fleet.

Ray Breyer and I have discussed the elusive Lehigh Valley boxcar fleet over the years. He has pulled data from ORER listings and other sources to summarize the Lehigh Valley boxcar fleet of 1925. This PDF document is available as a resource on the Freight Car Fleets page. We hope modelers find it useful as they build Lehigh Valley boxcars for their fleets. We plan to add more railroad fleet data and details in the future.

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Data

Prototype modelers love data. Sifting through the details of an Official Railway Equipment Register (ORER) can offer insight to many different in-service freight cars. A few months ago, I went through a 1926 ORER and tabulated data on car types for each railroad. It wasn’t as difficult as it sounds.

1926 B&O freight car fleet – 3

B&O class N-12e 322841 is a 1921 product of the Pressed Steel Car Company.

Do you recognize this coal hopper? I know you recognize the railroad name, but do you recognize the car design? It looks similar to many hoppers used in the first four decades of the 20th Century. The B&O had more than 1400 of these N-12e class cars listed in the October 1926 Official Railway Equipment Register (ORER). There were 14,364 overall N-12 class cars. Are you surprised?

Port Richmond yard images

Port Richmond, November 15, 1926. Collection of Eric Hansmann.

I picked up a few neat photos at the St Louis RPM last summer. I used these in my RPM Chicagoland presentation and thought I’d share them with some notes. Photographs were often taken to document projects in many cities. In these cases, the Reading Company hired a photographer to snap progress photos of a new project at their Port Richmond yards along the Delaware River in Philadelphia. You can see some concrete footers extending through the above image that will connect a new grain pier with a grain elevator. Click on any image here to view a larger size.

Continue reading “Port Richmond yard images”

B&O freight houses

I’ve been reviewing many amazing images on the Historic Pittsburgh digital archive as research and planning continue for the next layout project. I stumbled into some studies that were done in the 1920s to improve road and rail traffic. A few photo and map gems were found while paging through “Railroads of the Pittsburgh district: a part of the Pittsburgh plan”.

Continue reading “B&O freight houses”