Contemporary Model Rolling Stock And Golden West Service

As I've remarked here now and then, except for locomotives, it's fairly difficult to find rolling stock that's like what you actually see if you go railfanning at places like West Colton. But just recently I discovered Intermountain's Value Line. I've tried to find references to this on the web, but so far, I've been unsuccessful. This appears to be a reissue of some of the LBF/E&C Shops/Hubert's line of HO rolling stock, which I always liked.

What was good about this line was that it did in fact model freight cars you could actually see on the prototype, at least in the 1990s and early 2000s. Unfortunately, the line changed hands several times and eventually disappeared, but apparently is now resuscitated by Intermountain, assembled and painted in China.

I discovered that M B Klein was carrying a number of the Value Line cars. I was especially interested in the Golden West Service boxcars. What's really great is that these are in faded blue with SP reporting marks and number patches. Here's the one I ordered the other week:

All I've done to it so far has been to paint the wheel faces and the couplers Rust. The car comes with metal wheels and real Kadee 5s, which makes it a slightly better buy than equivalent Roundhouse cars, not to mention that the tooling is more recent and closer to prototype. For comparison, here's a recent photo of an equivalent prototype Golden West Service car:

You can see that the model has a paint patch with a new SP reporting mark and number. UP in this case is continuing to use the SP reporting mark. Here is an older car I have from E&C Shops (I think). Notice that, even though I've faded it some, the car has a much darker blue and VCY reporting marks. (YCY is the Ventura County Railroad, now part of G&W.)

Golden West Service was a late 1980s scheme whereby the Southern Pacific, financially failing, sold many of its freight cars to Greenbrier, which had Gunderson rebuild them, often to updated configurations, and leased them to shortlines that connected to SP, Ventura County and Galveston Wharves, and other leasing companies. Once the original leases expired, which would have been about 2005, the cars reverted to SP (now UP) ownership and had their reporting marks restenciled to SP, SSW, and DRGW, although it's still possible to find cars with older reporting marks.

The original Golden West Service paint from the 1980s was a much darker blue, but over more than 30 years, it's faded. So the Intermountain Value Line cars with faded blue and SP reporting mark patch would be post-2005. However, for my layout, I'll need to tag the car and also add post-2010 conspicuity stripes.

The recent Intermoutain car differs from the E&C car in that it has double plug doors, rather than double sliding doors. Checking photos on line, I find that cars in series SP 228000 do have double plug doors, but cars in 228500 and higher have double sliding doors. I'm not sure about the X-panel roof on the Intermountain car. Other Golden West Service boxcars, prototype and E&C model, have roofs with parallel ribs, but it's entirely possible that Gunderson mixed and matched when it rebuilt the cars.