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.