Walthers Mainline Susquehanna "Susie-Q" Boxcar

I'm a sucker for anything Susquehanna. I lived in northern New Jersey with my family until 1963, and around 1962, I was old enough to ride to Butler on my bike to railfan the Susquehanna. By then, it was owned by real estate developer Irving Maidman, and it had acquired the appearance it took in a couple of Pechulis Media DVDs, surrounded by knee-to-waist-high brown weeds, with not much happening. But that was my one dose of Susquehanna. Not ong ago, I ordered a Walthers Mainline Susie-Q boxcar:

Most models of these cars use an AAR 40-foot box car body, but prototype photos show they were an older, smaller style:

According to the Model Rairoader Forum,

The 400-series cars were - as you found - PS-1’s that NYSW purchased in the late 1940’s. In the early 60’s, the railroad sold all but two of them (401 and 402) to the Monon. To replace them, they purchased a group of 40’ boxcars from the Lehigh Valley (oddly, the replacement cars were built in 1926, which made them significantly older than the cars they replaced - I don’t get that decision). Those cars were numbered in the 500-series and many of them were repainted into the green Susie-Q scheme.

Although the boxcar body style on the model is fairly close to the car in the photo, there are differences in the side sill, but it's a better choice than the usual AAR 40-foot car. The Walthers model gets the green color and the Susie-Q figure right, but the style of lettering for the Susquehanna road name differs from the photo.

The Susie-Q lettering would have come after my one trip to Butler. According to Wikipedia, Ford closeds its Edgewater Assembly Plant in 1955, which cost the NYS&W one of their primary sources of traffic. 1961, real-estate developer and millionaire Irving Maidman purchased the Ford plant for use as a rental warehouse, and he eventually purchased an Alcoa plant for the same purpose.

In October 1962, Maidman purchased the NYS&W to ensure their freight operations in Edgewater remained active, and he began arranging for the railroad to lease some property in Edgewater for backup storage. I've seen elsewhere that the Susie-Q paint scheme was the result of a Maidman-sponsored employee contest. However, traffic on the Edgewater Branch continued to decline, and the Susquehanna declared bankruptcy in 1976. In 1980, the NYS&W was sold to the Delaware Otsego Corporation, which began ther road's revival.

Walthers Proto Penn Central GP9

I'm a big Penn Central fan; I commuted on it to school from Washington to Springfield, MA during its first two years. I couldn't wait to get a Proto Phase III PC GP9.

I wouldn't have complained if they'd offered a PC GP9 in their Mainline range, where the only real difference would have been the lack of end grab irons, which as you can see in the photo are practically invisible on an all-black model.

The PRR had 270 GP9s, numbered 7000-7269. They all kept their numbers under PC. It appears that PRR/PC 7230-7269 were Phase III, with 48" diameter radiator fans, instead of 36" fans on earlier GP9s and GP7s. This final order also lacked PRR train phone antennas.

One difference between Walthers Proto and Walthers Mainline is that Proto has more features in the ESU decoders. The most visible change is that the number boards can be separately lit via function key 6:

In railroad rule books, the number boards are typically lit only on the control unit in the consist, but it looks like most prototype engineers forget to set this either on or off. Notice too that since the PRR GP9s kept their numbers going into PC, their numberboards retained the special PRR serif style, which Walthers reproduced.

The ESU sound decoder with the Proto version has the LokSound 5 prime mover delay at start feature. This means that when you throttle up, it takes the loco a fairly long time to begin to move, reproducing the prototype spool-up time. Setting CV 124=16 will turn this off; CV124=20 will put it back. As a longtime DC operator, I've never gotten used to features like this. I also set CVs 3 and 4, acceleration and deceleration momentum, to 0. These features are maybe more suited to large club-type layouts, but each to his own!

Lemonade Out Of Lemons

Fifty years ago, I used brake fluid to remove paint from plastic models. It was messy, and it sometimes dissolved the whole model, or at least twisted it out of shape. Eventually I switched to Easy Lift-Off, apparently still available from Testors, which worked a little better, but these days, I pretty much avoid painting whenever I can, especially because factory paint jobs are so much better. But here's an old Varney car that didn't quite make it out of the brake fluid:

Before I tossed the whole thing, I remembered I'd seen photos of hoppers whose backs had broken. This was common enough that railroads had elevated tracks in yards where the loads of bad-order hoppers like this could be dumped into cars in better condition and continue their journeys, so I decided to push on with this one. I even replaced the cast steps and grabs with brass ones.

I lettered the car with a Herald King Decal set. The big question was what color Westmoreland Coal carx were. I think the Herald King instructions said the car was red, and I probably used Floquil Zinc Chromate Primer for this one. However, manufacturers mostly did models in black, including Old and Weary Car Shops and Micro Trains. Bowser, though, did a model gon in red. Protutype photos seem to go both ways:

Playing Catch-up With ACI Labels

I finally realized I have to start playing catch-up with putting ACI labels on my equipment from the 1960s and 70s.

The Kartrak system with ACI color-coded labels was an unsuccessful program that lasted from 1968 to 1978, so it covered the period of the first big mergers, N&W, PC, ICG, BN, SCL, Chessie System, etc. It apparently failed for two reasons, fist, the ACI labels got dirty and unreadable, but more important, the program required labels on all cars, but it didn't require the railroads to install readers. So it never quite got going.

I think I stopped putting ACI labels on the cars that should have them when I ran out of the Micro Scale decal data sheets that carried them. For many years, they were the go-to source, but eventually Micro Scale became hard to deal with.

I looked at the current sources, and for now, the least expensive is from K4 Decals, whch I'm using for the current project.

Back when I was modeling in the 1960s and 1970s, it was hard to find photos that showed where specifically the ACI labels were mounted on a particuiar prototype car. These days, with internet sources like the Fallen Flags site, this is much easier.

In Praise Of Walthers Mainline

I recently picked up two Walthers Mainline SD60s that a retailer seems to have been anxious to clear out. I assume these were the least popular roadnames from the last run, and they let these sound-and-DCC locos go for roughly half price.

Between the paint and drives, I'll take just about any roadname, especially since for some decades, pretty much any roadname can turn up on any prototype railroad. The paint is even, opaque, and sharp. The sound is budget, reduced-function, but that's fine, especially for a trailing unit. The only CVs I need to tweak are CVs 3 and 4, acceleration-deceleration momentum. which I switch to 0, simply because I'm used to it as an old DC operator.

For some time, I've noticed that the Walthers quality assurance is head and shoulders above the competition. It's been some years since I had a loco with a missing part (a cab side window), and Walthers supplied a new one by return mail.

Track Cleaning Hack

The problem with track cleaning cars is that if the track is dirty enough to need cleaning, the loco pulling the car is going to have spotty performance on the dirty track. Sometimes I daydream about getting a radio controlled battery powered "dead rail" loco for this purpose, but it suddenly dawned on me that I could hook a 9 volt battery onto an ordinary HO diesel chassis and have pretty much the same result at far less cost and trouble.

I wound up ordering a 3-pack of what Amazon calls a DAIERTEK 9V Battery Holder with on-off switch at $6.99. I used an old Stewart/Kato F-unit chassis that had couplers mounted. I disconnected the ttrack leads from the trucks to the wire bus on the plastic mother board and soldered the leads from the battery holder to those same wire leads. I installed a 9 volt bettery, taped the holder to the chassis, turned the on-off switch ON, and it went whirring away.

I can turn the Stewart chassis back to a model loco simply by untaping the battery holder, unsoldering the battery leads, and reconnecting the track leads from the trucks, but I would probably add a DCC decoder if I did this. If the whole idea doesn't work out, that's what will happen.

My layout cleasrances are set up for "Ezceeds Plate C" auto parts cars and such, and the battery holder has no trouble with tunnels and bridges.

My main line is an oval in a sort of double folded figure eight, about 160 feet. At 9 volts, the Stewart chassis runs at a medium-slow speed, which avoids derailments. It takes several minutes to do a complete transit of the main line. A big advantage is that the layout has really too much hidden track, but this setup will clean in the tunnels. The hookup works on 2% grades on the main line.

The photo shows it coupled to an A-Line track cleaning pad mounted in an Athearn box car. I've also used it with a Bachmann track cleaning tank car. So far, it seems to need at leastr a dozen transits of the main line to get things in acceptable shape. Full testing is still under way.

A Few More Howard Moore Photos

Howard Moore's photos are fairly difficult to date. But this one is of a Santa Fe F3 that looks like it was in from its first run to Los Angeles after delivery in November 1946:

ATSF 16 was the class unit of the 16 class. In their original form, they had no lower headlight on the nose, and there was a third porthole in the A unit sides. The lower headlight and revised side vents were added over subsequent months. They remained on the Santa Fe's most prestigious passenger trains for their whole careers.

Here is PA-1 51, again just after delivery in September, 1946. It's posed on a special Pacific Electric siding on Exposition Boullevard in Los Angeles, where railroads often displayed new equipment:

ATSF 51 was re-engined by EMD in 1954.

Here is Santa Fe FT 158 in Barstow during the 1946-7 period.

The Santa Fe equipped some FT sets with steam generators and painted them in red and silver in 1946, contemporary with the other photos here. The last passenger FTs were returned to the freight scheme in 1954.