Prototype Information
Most prototype cars, especially freight cars, are built of components from a variety of sources. The car ends, for example, can (or could) be purchased from Pullman Standard or Youngstown Steel Products.
Side sheets can be built up from raw materials, i . e . , sheets of Cor-ten steel, angle iron and wooden planks, or purchased assembled from a supplier. The same applies to roofs and underbody parts.
The point of this is that even when a piece of equipment is described as being built in company shops, that car was assembled as a kit from commercially available parts, just as a modeler does in miniature. It does not matter whether the car was built at Omaha (UP) , Havelock (CB&Q), Topeka (AT&SF), Alexandria (FGE), etc.; the point is that it was made up of components that were purchased and brought together for a specific piece of equipment.
Researching this information on prototype rolling stock can be fun and the resources for that information is available in a variety of formats.
Car Builder's Cyclopedias. Car Builder’s Cyclopedias and Dictionaries are great resources for
the modeler. Several early editions can be viewed online and downloaded
for easy reference. The following are in the public domain. Searches on the internet will also show hardcopy of Car Builder Cyclopedias available for purchase. I have hard copies from 1930- 1970 in my research library.
1925 – single page download only
Prototype Railroad Equipment Diagrams. Equipment Diagram Books are a collection of equipment diagrams, representing most of the freight car fleet of the issuing railroad. The equipment diagrams are not scale drawings. They are impressions of what the car looks like, and provide a record of the capacity, dimensions and ancillary items. See 9.0.10 Freight Equipment Diagram Book for additional information.
Car Photographs
Modeling Information
It is given that there is no such thing as a perfect model, so what constitutes an 'accurate' representation is, to a degree, relative and somewhat subjective. A model is a representation of reality. It is up to the modeler to decide what level of prototype fidelity is acceptable.
When I first started to get involved in railroad modeling, I was clueless to the differences in rolling stock models. A box car was a box car, etc., etc. It became really interesting when I started reading about the differences of equipment by era, manufacturer, component, etc. I have tried to centralize my notes on these differences in a series of car identification pages. See below for those notes.
Car Identification
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