Re: (erielack) Athearn/Roundhouse Wood Milk Tank Cars

[MDelvec952_@_aol.com]

In a message dated 2/28/06 10:43:46 PM Eastern Standard Time, 
webotkin_@_ecentral.com writes:

>  These cars are new tooling and are very nicely done with separately 
applied 
> hand grabs and ladders, metal wheel sets and Kadee style couplers.  
Assembled,
>  they cost $20 at Caboose Hobbies.

Bill is quite right, these are very nice cars and accurate for those that ran 
on the Sussex Branch and on the DL&W main line trains.   These cars were one 
of the two types that had been rebuilt into the streamstyled "butterdish" milk 
cars beginning mid- to late-1930s. The other type were one series of the 
wooden General American Pfaudler cars -- the side sill is the main spotting 
feature, the MDT-built cars that the Roundhouse model represents have the 
channel-steel sidesill, the GA cars had a narrow sidesill with the aluminum skin wrapped 
partially around it. Far more of the MDT-built butterdish cars appear on DL&W 
trains than the GA cars. The steel Pfaudler cars gradually replaced the 
wooden and butterdish cars starting about 1950. By the end of steam they were rare 
if not gone -- has anyone seen a photo of a butterdish or a wooden Borden's 
milk car on a train after the end of steam?  I haven't.

Roundhouse first offered several billboard paint schemes and undecorated.  
The billboards are very well done and correct for the car-type, though not all 
of the billboards are DL&W natives. The painted cars come assembled with 
separate ladders and grab irons, but sans cut levers.  Keep in mind that the 
billboards ran through Lackawanna-land in the 1920s and '30s, so lube up your 
camelbacks to run 'em in the right era.  Repainted cars that weren't streamlined by 
the 1940s and after WWII got solid-color paint schemes and simple lettering.  I 
wound up with five undecorated cars, which come without the ladders and 
details attached for easier painting.  Roundhouse is willing to offer the simple 
paint schemes in a later run.

I've been watching for these cars in slides and movies since the mid-1980s, 
and the colors of most of the cars in the 1950s seem to be tomato red with 
imitation gold lettering, and some of the oldest paint jobs are coach green with 
imitation gold lettering.  A couple show up in color in Mark I Video's 
Lackawanna series of videos.   And there was at least one car, BFIX 550, that was 
cream colored with black lettering; two color photos of it appear in the 
Lackawanna Trackside with Henry Peterson book, pages 48-49, from Morning Sun.

The Roundhouse cars aren't perfect, but they're very good with fine details 
and correct proportions.  The only detail I might fix on mine is the end sill; 
the prototype end sill was almost twice as tall as the one on the model, 
suggesting that Roundhouse used the drawing in Mohowski's O&W book as its end sill 
is narrow, too.  Even the running boards look great, and should look even 
better painted. And they roll like the wind -- we now have a new source for 
correct milk car trucks. (The GA cars had a different truck.)

Keep in mind that milk cars were generally in leased fleets that tended to 
stay on steady routes on single railroads, and since they weren't often 
interchanged with other roads they were allowed to get very dirty thus fading a lot of 
the markings and altering the perceived color. (I've been keeping a list of 
car numbers seen in this area in which configuration and paint scheme, but 
since they're behind the locomotive and dirty the numbers are too-often 
unreadable.) Too, even though they weren't often interchanged between railroads, they 
were still covered by the 1937 ICC rule that in way-too-many words banned and 
phased out billboard advertising on rail cars (There were a few reasons to 
justify the ruling, and one was the result of shippers complaining in the context 
of mostly reefers that the company paying to use the reefer would often be 
advertising the products of a competitor.  This ruling limited railcars to 12" 
lettering spelling out the name of the owner, and the Phoebe Snow billboard 
boxcars of 1942 were one of the first paint schemes to make something attractive 
out of it, helping to usher in an era of railroad billboard boxcars.

Also, as good as these cars and their underframes are, the bodies and 
sidesills are molded in one piece which appears to make it impractical to plop an old 
Funaro & Camerlengo resin butterdish car on this underframe (The F&C 
butterdish casting was demensionally slightly small anyhow).  Has anyone seen the 
resin re-release of the butterdish cars from F&C?  The earlier version was good 
for the GA car, which makes them worth keeping since the underframes were so 
visually different from the MDT cars.

Happy modeling; nice to have additional accurate models to put ahead of the 
stove-equipped combine on Train 47.

Mike Del Vecchio

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